


Lighted to Lighten 




The Hope of India 



Bv Alice B. Van Doren 



*L;^^.:^^i^ »;,::'?.;;■:■*= ,' . ' .■- 







CDEmiGllT DEPOSIT. 






REGINA THUMBOO 

The First M. A. from Isabella Thoburn 
College, Lucknow 



Lighted to Lighten 

The Hope of India 



A Study of Conditions 
among Women in India 



By ALICE B. VAN DOREN 



>h 



1922 

Published by 

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ON THE UNITED STUDY 
OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 

West Medford, Massachusetts 



V 



Copyright, 1922, by 

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ON THE UNITED STUDY 

OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 



The Vermont Printing Company 
Brattleboro 



SEP 15 1922 

©C!.A6R3238 



FOREWORD 

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE sends out this 
book on Indian girlhood to meet the young 
women of America with their high privilege of edu- 
cation, that often unrealized and unacknowledged gift 
of Christ. 

Miss Van Doren has given emphasis in the book 
to the privileged young woman of India; she shows 
the possibilities, and yet you will see in it something 
of the black shadow cast by that religion which holds 
no place for the redemption of woman. If you could 
see it in its hideousness which the author can only 
hint at, you would say as two American college girls 
said after a tour through India, "We cannot endure 
it. Don't take us to another temple. We never 
dreamed that anything under the guise of religion 
could be so vile." And somehow there has seemed to 
them since a note of insincerity in poetic phrasings 
of Hindu writers who pass over entirely gross forms 
of idolatrous faith to indulge in noble sentiments 
which suggest plagiarism. A distinguished author 
said recently, "1 can never read Tagore again after 
seeing the women of India." From sacred temple slums 
of South India to shambles of Kalighat it is re- 
volting, sickening, shameful. It is pleasanter to dwell 
on the beauties of Hinduism and ignore the unprint- 
able actualities, but if we are to help we must feel 



4 Lighted to Lighten 

how terrible and immediate the need is. No one can 
really meet that need but the educated Indian Chris- 
tian women whom God is preparing in this day for 
service. They are the ones who are Lighted to 
Lighten. They are the Hope of the future. Fifty 
years ago, after the Civil war, the light began in 
the organization of Woman's Missionary Societies. 
Through all the years women have gone, never very 
many, sometimes not very strong, limited in various 
ways, but with one stern determination, at any cost 
"to save some." 

Now at the close of your war, young women of 
America, a new era is beginning in which you are 
called to take your part. You will not be the pioneers. 
The trail is blazed. It has been proven that Indian 
girls can be educated, their minds are keen and eager, 
they are Christian, many of them, in a sense which 
girls of America cannot comprehend. Their task is 
infinitely greater than yours. If they fail, the redemp- 
tion of Indian womanhood will not be realized, and 
so we see them taking as the college emblem, not the 
beautiful, decorated brass lamp of the palace, but the 
common, little clay lamp of the poorest home and 
going out with the flickering flame to lighten the deep 
darkness of their land. College girls in America some- 
times wear their degree as a decoration. To these 
girls it is equipment, armor, weapons, for the tear- 
ing down of strongholds. These girls must be leaders. 
They cannot escape the challenge. 

Until now the undertaking has seemed hopeless. 



Foreword 5 

What could a few foreign women do among those 
millions? But the great, silent revolution has begun. 
Eastern women are seeking self-determination as na- 
tions seek it. They are asserting rights to soul and 
mind and body. They refuse to be chattels, and going 
out to release these millions come these little groups 
of Christian college girls who are to furnish leader- 
ship. Have we no part? Yes, as allies we are needed 
as never before. Unless from the faculties of our 
colleges, as well as from our student volunteers, ade- 
quate aid is sent at once these little groups may fail. 
This is your "moral equivalent of war." To go and 
help them in this Day which is their Day of Decision 
requires vision, devotion, a glorious giving of life 
which will count just in proportion as the need is 
immediate, the battle in doubt, failure possible. Mis- 
sion Boards must go haltingly for lack of women 
and of funds until groups of women from colleges in 
America hear the call of Christ and follow Him, for 
God Himself will not do this work alone. He has 
chosen that it shall be done through you. From our 
colleges and medical schools recruits and funds must 
be sent until those who are in the new colleges over 
there are trained and ready to win India for their 
Master. To bring them over here for training is not 
altogether good. There are dangers in this our age 
of jazz. It is not good to send out very young girls 
to a far country during the formative years lest a 
strange language and customs and a new civilization 
should unfit them to go back to their "Main Street" 



6 Lighted to Lighten 

and adjust themselves. The Indian Colleges are best 
for the undergraduate Indian girl and are the only- 
ones for the great majority. We must make these 
the best possible, truly Christian in their teaching and 
standards, in impressions on the lives of students as 
well as in their mission to the people of India. 

This book is for study in our church societies of 
older girls and of women, and very especially for girls 
in the colleges, who should consider this as one of the 
greatest fields for service in the world to-day. We 
preach internationalism. Let our churches and col- 
leges practice it. 

Mrs. Henry W. Peabody 
Miss Alice M. Kyle 
Mrs. Frank Mason North 
Miss Gertrude Schultz 
Miss 0. H. Lawrence 
Mrs. a. V. Pohlman 
Miss Emily Tillotson 



Note: The Central Committee recommends Dr. Fleming's 
book, "Building with India", for advanced study classes and 
groups who wish really to study. For Women's societies 
wishing programs for meetings we think Miss Van Doren's 
book better as it is less difficult and more concrete. 



CONTENTS 

chapter page 

Foreword 3 

List of Illustrations „ . . 8 

Preface 9 

Introduction 11 

I Yesterday and To-day 13 

II At School 31 

A High School 37 

III The Garden of Hid Treasure 57 

LUCKNOW 61 

IV An International Alliance 83 

V Sent Forth to Heal 110 

VI Women Who Do Things 130 

Index 153 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing Page 

Regina Thumboo Frontispiece 

What Will Life Bring to Her? 16 

Meenachi of Madura 21 

Married to the God 24 

Will Life Be Kind to Her? 28 

A Temple in South India 33 

The Sort of Home that Arul Knew 37 

Priests of the Hindu Temple 44 

Tamil Girls Preparing for College 48 

The Village of the Seven Palms 48 

Basketball at Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow 53 

Biology Class at Lucknow College 60 

A Social Service Group — Lucknow College 65 

Village People 69 

Girls of All Castes Meet on Common Ground 76 

Shelomith Vincent 80 

Street Scenes in Madras 85 

Scenes at Madras College 92 

At Work and Play 97 

The New Dormitory at Madras College 101 

The Old India 108 

Contrasts 112 

First Building at New Medical School, Vellore 115 

Dr. Scudder and the Medical Students at Vellore 117 

Where God is a Stone Image — Where God is Love 119 

A Medical Student in Vellore 122 

Better Babies 124 

Freshman Class at Vellore — Latest Arrivals at Vellore 126 

Dora Mohini Maya Das 131 

Mrs. Paul Appasamy 135 

Putting Spices In Baby's Milk 138 

Baby on Scales 142 

A Representative of India's Womanhood 152 

8 



PREFACE 

THESE chapters are written with no claim to 
their being an accurate representation of hfe in 
all India, That India is a continent rather than a 
country is a statement so often repeated that it has 
become trite. To understand the details of girl-life in 
all parts of this continent would require a variety of 
experience which the present v/riter cannot claim. 
This book is written frankly from the standpoint of 
one who has spent fifteen years in the South, and 
known the North only from brief tours and the ac- 
quaintance which reading can give. 

For help in advice and criticism thanks are due to 
friends too numerous to name ; especial mention, how- 
ever, should be made of the kindness of three Indian 
critics who have read the manuscript : Miss Maya Das 
of the Y. W. C. A., Calcutta, Mr. Chandy of Banga- 
lore, and Mr. Athiseshiah of Voorhees College, Vellore. 



TO-MORROW 

"If there were no Christian College in India, the foreshad- 
owings of a great To-morrow would demand its creation. 
It is needed : 

(1) for training native leadership in this age when all 
India is demanding Indian leadership along all lines, 
and is impatient of foreign control. 

(2) for developing Christian workers for the multitudes in 
India who are turning to Christianity and need care 
and shepherding in schools and in all phases of daily 
life. 

(3) for the education of those who will be the homemakers 
of their country, that the stamp of Christianity may 
be upon the minds and lives of mothers and wives in 
this New India. 

(4) for moralizing the social life in India which otherwise 
would have the bias of an increasingly dispropor- 
tionate educated male population. 

(5) for demonstrating the uplifting influence of Christ upon 
that sex which has been so disastrously ignored and 
repressed in India, and for proving that the best is 
none too good for Indian womanhood. 'Better women' 
are the strongest factor in the development of a Better 
India. 

(6) for definitely distributing the ideals of Christian wom- 
anhood to all parts of Southern Asia from which the 
College draws its students. Personal witness to the 
value of Christian education for women is a real 
Kingdom message. 

(7) for training women to take their part in the new na- 
tional life of awakened India. This training must be 
by contact with lives already devoted to Christ, more 
than by precept, for 'character is caught, not taught.' 

(8) for meeting the needs of the more educated classes of 
India, as the evangelistic and other parts of mission 
work minister specifically to the needs of the masses." 

(9) In furnishing pre-medical training for the hundreds 
of women who must be educated to follow in the 
footsteps of the Great Physician. 

10 



INTRODUCTION 

TO say that the world is one is to-day's common- 
place. What causes its new solidarity? What 
but the countless hands that reach across its shores and 
its Seven Seas, hands that devastate and hands that 
heal! There are the long fingers of the cable and 
telegraph that pry through earth's hidden places, 
gathering choice bits of international gossip and 
handing them out to all the breakfast tables of the 
Great Neighborhood. There are the swift fingers of 
transcontinental train and ocean liner, pushing t'ne 
dweller from the West into the Far East, the man from 
the prairie into the desert. There are the devastating 
fingers of war that first fashion and then carry infernal 
machines and spread them broadcast over towns and 
ships and fertile fields. Thank God, there are also 
hands of kindness that dispense healing medicines, that, 
scatter schoolbooks among untaught children '\nd the 
Word of God in all parts of earth's neighborhood. 
And, lastly, there are hands that seem never to leave 
the house roof and the village street, yet gain the 
power of the long reach and set thousands of candles 
alight across the world. 

"Why don't you let them alone? Their religion is 
good enough for them," was the classic comment of 
the armchair critic of a generation ago. Time has 
answered it. Nothing in to-day's world ever lets any- 
thing else alone. We read the morning paper in 

11 



12 Lighted to Lighten 

terms of continents. To the League of Nations China 
and Chile are concerns as intimate as Upper Silesia. 
To the Third Internationale the obscure passes of Af- 
ghanistan are a near frontier. Suffrage and prohibi- 
tion are echoed in the streets of Poona and in the 
councils of Delhi. Labor strikes in West Virginia and 
Wales produce reactions in the cotton mills of Madras. 
And the American girl in high school, in college, in 
business, in society, in a profession, is producing her 
double under tropic suns, in far-off streets where 
speech and dress and manners are strange, but the 
heart of Hfe is one. That time is past ; we cannot let 
them alone ; we can only choose what shall be the 
shape and fashioning done by hands that reach across 
the sea. 



CHAPTER ONE 

Yesterday and To-day 

"Once upon a "Once upon a time"^ men and worn- 
Time." en dwelt in caves and cliffs and fash- 
ioned curious implements from the stones of the earth 
and painted crude pictures upon the walls of their rock 
dwellings. Archaeologists find such traces in England 
and along the river valleys of France, among the 
sands of Egyptian deserts and in India, where armor 
heads, ancient pottery, and cromlechs mark the passing 
of a long forgotten race. Thus India claims her place 
in the universal childhood of the world. 

The Brown- "Once upon a time,"^ when the Stone 

skinned Tribes. Men had passed, a strange, new civ- 
ilization is thought to have girdled the earth, passing 
probably in a "brown belt" from Mediterranean lands 
across India to the Pacific world and the Americas. 
Its sign was the curious symbol of the Swastika; its 
passwords certain primitive customs common to all 
these lands. Its probable Indian representatives are 
known today as Dravidians — the brown-skinned peo- 
ple still dominating South Indian life, whose exact 
place in the family of races puzzles every anthropolo- 
gist. It was then that civilization was first walking up 



1. History of India, E. W. Thompson, Christian Literature Society, 
London and Madras, pp. 11-12. 

2. Otttliae of History, H, G. Wells, Vol. I, pp. 146-8. 

13 



14 Lighted to Lighten 

and down the great river valleys of the Old World. 
While the first pyramids^ were a-building beside the 
long green ribbon of the Nile and the star-gazers* of 
Mesopotamia were reading future events from her 
towers of sun-dried bricks, Dravidian tribes were 
cultivating the rich mud of the Ganges valley, a slow- 
changing race. Did the lonely traveler, I wonder, troll 
the same air then as now to ward away evil spirits 
from the star-lit road ? Did the Dravidian maiden do 
her sleek hair in the same knot at the nape of her 
brown neck, and poise the earthen pot with the same 
grace on her daily pilgrimage to the river ? 

The Aryan "Once upon a time" Abraham pitched 

Brother. his tent beneath the oaks of Mamre, 

and Moses shepherded his father-in-law's flocks at 
"the back side of the desert." It was then that down 
through the grim passes of the Himalayas, where now 
the British regiments convoy caravans and guard the 
outposts of Empire, a people of fair skin and strange 
speech migrated southward to the Land of the Five 
Rivers and the fat plains of the Ganges. Aryan even 
as we, the Brahman entered India, singing hymns to 
the sun and the dawn, bringing with him the stately 
Sanskrit speech, new lore of priest and shrine, new 
pride of race that was to cleave society into those hori- 
zontal strata that persist to-day in the caste system. 
Thus through successions of Stone-Age men, Dravid- 



3. Outline of History, H. G. Wells, Vol. I, pp. 196-199. 

4. Outline of History, H. G. Wells, Vol. I, pp. 189-190. 



Yesterday and To-day 15 

ian tribes, and Aryan invaders, India stretches her 
roots deep into the past. But while there were trans- 
piring these 

"Old, unhappy, far-off things 
And battles long ago," 
where were we? The superior Anglo-Saxon who 
speaks complacently of "the native" forgets that dur- 
ing that same "once upon a time" when civilization was 
old in India, his ancestors, clad in deer skin and blue 
paint, were stalking the forests of Europe for food. 

Gifts to the Nor did these old civilizations for- 

West. bear to reach hands across the sea 

and share with the young and lusty West the fruits of 
their knowledge. On a May morning, as skilful car- 
riers swing you up to the heights of the South India 
hills, there is a sudden sound reminiscent of the home 
barnyard, a scurry of wings across the path, and a 
gleam of glossy plumage; Mr. Jungle Cock has been 
disturbed in his morning meal. Did you know that 
from his ancestors are descended in direct lineage all 
the Plymouth Rocks and the White Leghorns of the 
poultry yard, all the Buff Orpingtons that win gold 
medals at poultry shows? Other food stuffs India 
originated and shared. Sugar and rice were delicacies 
from her fields carried over Roman roads to please the 
palates of the Caesars.^ 

Traditions of Besides these contributions to the 
Womanhood. world's pantry, there were gifts of 

5. Ancient Times, Breasted, pp. 658-9. 



16 Lighted to Lighten 

the mind and spirit. To those days of long ago mod- 
ern India looks back as to a golden age, for she was 
then in the forefront of civilization, passing out her 
gifts with a generous hand. Of that ancient heritage 
not the least part is the tradition of womanhood, — a 
heritage trampled in the dust of later ages, its restora- 
tion only now beginning through that liberty in Christ 
which sets free the woman of the West and of the 
East. 

Much might be written on the place of the Indian 
woman in folk-lore epic and drama. Helen of Troy 
and Dido of Carthage pale into common adventuresses 
when placed beside the quiet courage and utter self- 
abnegation of such Indian heroines as Sita and Damay- 
anti. 

The story of Rama and Sita is the Odyssey of the 
East, crooned by grandmothers over the evening fires ; 
sung by wandering minstrels under the shade of 
the mango grove; trolled by travelers jogging in bul- 
lock carts along empty moonlit roads. Sita's devotion 
is a household word to many a woman-child of India. 
Little Lakshmi follows the adventures of the loved 
heroine as she shares Rama's unselfish renunciation of 
the throne and exile to the forest with its alarms of 
wild beasts and wild men. She thrills with fear at 
Sita's abduction by the hideous giant, Ravana, and 
the wild journey through the air and across the sea 
to the Ceylon castle. She weeps with Rama's despair, 
and again laughs with glee at the antics of his monkey 
army from the south country, as they build their 







WHAT WILL LIFE BRING TO HER? 



Yesterday and To-day 17 

bridge of stones across the Ceylon straits where now- 
a-days British engineers have followed in their simian 
track and train and ferry carry the casual traveler 
across the gaps jumped by the monkey king and his 
tribe. Sita's sore temptations in the palace of her con- 
queror and her steadfast loyalty until at last her hus- 
band comes victorious — they are part of the heritage 
of a million Lakshmis all up and down the length of 
India. 

Of the loves of Nala and Damayanti it is difficult 
to write in few words. From the opening scene where 
the golden-winged swans carry Nala's words of love to 
Damayanti in the garden, sporting at sunset with her 
maidens, the old tale moves on with beauty and with 
pathos. The Swayamvara, or Self Choice, harks back 
to the time when the Indian princess might herself 
choose among her suitors. Gods and men compete for 
Damayanti's hand among scenes as bright and stately 
as the lists of King Arthur's Court, until the princess, 
choosing her human lover, throws about his neck 
the garland that declares her choice, Happy years 
follow, and the birth of children. Then the scene 
changes to exile and desertion. Through it all moves 
the heroine, sharing her one garment with her un- 
worthy lord, "thin and pale and travel-stained, with 
hair covered in dust," yet never faltering until her 
husband, sane and repentant, is restored to home and 
children and throne. 

So the ancient folk-lore goes on, in epic and in 
drama, with the woman ever the heroine of the tale. 



18 Lighted to Lighten 

True it is that her virtues are limited; obedience, 
chastity, and an unlimited capacity for suffering large- 
ly sum them up. They would scarcely satisfy the 
ambitions of the new woman of today; yet some 
among us might do well to pay them reverence. 

Those were the high days of Indian womanhood. 
Then, as the centuries passed, there came slow eclipse. 
Lawgivers like Manu'' proclaimed the essential im- 
purity of a woman's heart; codes and customs began 
to bind her with chains easy to forge and hard to 
break. Later followed the catastrophe that completed 
the change. The Himalayan gateways opened once 
more and through them swarmed a new race of in- 
vaders, passing out of those barren plains of Central 
Asia that have been ever the breeding grounds of 
nations and swooping upon India's treasures. In one 
hand the green flag of the Prophet, in the other the 
sword, these followers of Muhammad sealed for a 
millennium the end of woman's high estate. 

All was not lost without a mighty struggle.'^ From 
those days come the tales of Rajput chivalry — tales 
that might have been sung by the troubadours of 
France. Rajput maidens of noble blood scorned the 
throne of Muslim conquerors. Litters supposed to 
carry captive women poured out warriors armed to 
the teeth. Men and women in saffron robes and 
bridal garments mounted the great funeral pyre, and 
when the conquering Allah-ud-din entered the silent 



6. Code of Manu, Book 9, quoted Lux Christi, Mason, p. 14. 

7. India through the Ages, Florence Annie Steele, Routledge, pp. 
95-104, 116-18. 



Yesterday and To-day 19 

city of Chitore he found no resistance and no captives, 
for no one living was left from the great Sacrifice of 
Honorable Death. 

After that came an end. Everywhere the Muham- 
madan conqueror desired many wives; in a far and 
alien land his own womankind were few. Again and 
again the ordinary Hindu householder, lacking the des- 
perate courage of the Rajput, stood by helpless, like 
the Armenian of to-day, while his wife and daughter 
were carried off from before his eyes, to increase the 
harem of his ruler. Small wonder that seclusion be- 
came the order of the day — a woman would better 
spend her life behind the purdah of her own home than 
be added to the zenana of her conqueror. Later when 
the throes of conquest were over and Hindu women 
once more ventured forth to a wedding or a festival, 
small wonder that they copied the manners of their 
masters, and to escape familiarity and insult became 
as like as possible to women of the conquering race. 
Thus the use of the veil began. 

At that beginning we do not wonder ; what makes us 
marvel is that a repressing custom became so strong 
that, even after a century and a half of British rule, 
all over North India and among some conservative 
families of the South seclusion and the veil still per- 
sist. Walk the streets of a great commercial town 
like Calcutta, and you find it a city of men. An occa- 
sional Parsee lady, now and then an Indian Christian, 
here and there women of the cooly class whose lowly 



so Lighted to Lighten 

station has saved their freedom— otherwise woman- 
kind seems not to exist. 

The high hour of Indian womanhood had passed, 
not to return until brought back by the power of 
Christ, in whose kingdom there is "neither male nor 
female, but all are one." Yet as the afterglow flames 
up with a transient glory after the swift sunset, so 
in the gathering darkness of Muhammadan domination 
we see the brightness of two remarkable women. 

There was Nur Jahan, the "Light of the World," 
wife of the dissolute Jahangir. Never forgetful, it 
would seem, of a childish adventure when the little 
Nur Jahan in temper and pride set free his two pet 
doves, twenty years later the Mughal Emperor won 
her from her soldier husband by those same swift 
methods that David employed to gain the wife of 
Uriah, the Hittite. 

And when Nur Jahan became queen she was ruler 
indeed, "the one overmastering influence in his life."^ 
From that time on we see her, restraining her husband 
from his self-indulgent habits, improving his admin- 
istration, crossing flooded rivers and leading attacks on 
elephants to save him from captivity; "a beautiful 
queen, beautifully dressed, clever beyond compare, 
contriving and scheming, plotting, planning, shielding 
and saving, doing all things for the man hidden in the 
pampered, drink-sodden carcass of the king; the man 
who, for her at any rate, always had a heart." Think 
of Nur Jahan's descendants, hidden in the zenanas of 



8. India through the Ages, pp. 190-200. 



^* 




MEENACHI OF MADURA 
The Average Girl, a Bride at Twelve 



Yesterday and To-day 21 

India. When their powers, age-repressed, are set free 
by Christian education, what will it mean for the fu- 
ture of their nation? 

Then there came the lady of the Taj, Mumtaz Mahal, 
beloved of Shah Jahan, the Master Builder. We know 
less of her history, less of the secret of her charm, 
only that she died in giving birth to her thirteenth 
child, and that for all those years of married life she 
had held her husband's adoration. For twenty-two 
succeeding years he spent his leisure in collecting 
precious things from every part of his world that 
there might be lacking no adornment to the most ex- 
quisite tomb ever raised. And when it was finished — 
rare commentary on the contradiction of Mughal char- 
acter — the architect was blinded that he might never 
produce its like again. 

All that was a part of yesterday — a story of rise and 
fall; of woman's repression, with outbursts of great- 
ness; of countless treasures of talent and possibilities 
unrecognized and undeveloped, hidden behind the 
doors of Indian zenanas. What of to-day? 

TO-DAY: Meenachi of Madura, if she could be- 

The Average Girl, come articulate, might tell us some- 
thing of the life of the average girl to-day. Being 
average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of 
the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable 
outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class 
which is in India as everywhere the backbone of soci- 
ety. Meenachi's father is a weaver of the far-famed 



22 Lighted to Lighten 

Madura muslins with their gold thread border. Her 
earliest childhood memory is the quiet weavers' street 
where the afternoon sun glints under the tamarind 
trees and, striking the long looms set in the open air, 
brings out the blue and mauve, the deep crimson and 
purple and gold of the weaving. 

There were rollicking babyhood days when Mee- 
nachi, clad only in the olive of her satin skin with a 
silver fig leaf and a bead necklace for adornment, 
wandered in and out the house and about the looms 
at will. With added years came the burden of cloth- 
ing, much resented by the wearer, but accepted with 
philosophic submission, as harder things would be 
later on. Toys are few and simple. The palmyra rat- 
tle is exchanged for the stiff wooden doll, painted in 
gaudy colors, and the collection of tiny vessels in 
which sand and stones and seeds provide the equiva- 
lent of mud pies in repasts of imaginary rice and 
curry. Household duties begin also. Meenachi at the 
age of six grasps her small bundle of broom-grass and 
sweeps each morning her allotted section of verandah. 
Soon she is helping to polish the brass cooking pots and 
to follow her mother and older sisters, earthen water- 
pot on hip, on their morning and evening pilgrimages 
to the river. 

Being only an average girl, Meenachi will never go 
to school. There are ninety and nine of these "aver- 
age" unschooled girls to the one "above the average" 
to whom education offers its outlet for the questing 
spirit. She looks with curiosity at the books her 



Yesterday and To-day 23 

brother brings home from high school, but the strange, 
black marks which cover their pages mean nothing to 
her. Not for her the release into broad spaces that 
comes only through the written word. For, mark you, 
to the illiterate life means only those circumscribed 
experiences that come within the range of one's own 
sight and touch and hearing. "What I have seen, what 
I have heard, what I have felt" — there experience 
ends. From personal unhappiness there is no escape 
into the world current. 

Meenachi is twelve and the freedom of the long 
street is hers no more. Yellow chrysanthemums in her 
glossy hair, a special diet of milk and curds and sweet 
cakes fried in ghee, and the outspoken congratula- 
tions of relatives, male and female, mark her entrance 
into the estate of womanhood. What the West hides, 
the East delights to reveal. 

Now follows the swift sequel of marriage. The 
husband, of just the right degree of relationship, has 
long been chosen. The family exchequer is drained to 
the dregs to provide the heavy dowry, the burdensome 
expenditure for wedding feast and jewels, and the pres- 
entation of numerous wedding garments to equally 
numerous and expectant relatives. Meenachi is car- 
ried away by the splendor of new clothes and jewels 
and processions, and the general tamash of the occa- 
sion. Has she not the handsomest bridegroom and 
the most expensive trousseau of this marriage month? 
Is she not the envy of all her former playmates ? Only 
now and then comes a strange feeling of loneliness 



24 Lighted to Lighted 

vrhen she thinks of leaving the dear, familiar roof, the 
narrow street with its tamarind trees and manj'-col- 
ored looms. The mother-in-law's house is a hundred 
miles away, and the mother-in-law's face is strange. 

VN'iU Meenachi be sad or happy? The answer is 
complex and hard to find, for it depends on many con- 
tingencies. The husband — ^what will he be? He is 
not of Meenachi's choosing. Did she choose her 
father and mother, and the house in which she was 
bom? Were they not chosen for her, "written upon 
her forehead" by her Karma, her inscrutable fate? 
Her husband has been chosen ; let her make the best of 
the choice. 

\\'ill she be happy? The future years shall make 
answer by many things, WiU she bear sons to her 
husband ? If so, will her young body have strength for 
the pains of childbirth and the torturings of ignorant 
and brutal midwives? Will her Karma spare to her 
the life of husband and children? In India sudden 
dealb is never far; pestilence walks in darkness and 
destruction wastes at noon day. The fear of disease, 
the fear of demons, the fear of death will be never far 
away; for these fears there will be none to say, "Be 
not afraid-" 

So !Meenachi, the bride, passes out into the imknown 
of life, and later into the greater unknown of death. 
No one has taught her to say ia the valley of the shad- 
ow, "I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me." The 
terrors of life are with her, but its consolations are nor 
hers. 






MARRIED TO THE GOD 
A Little Temple Girl 



Yesterday and To-day 25 

Widowhood. Of widowhood I shall say little. 

Since the ancient days of suttee when the wife 
mounted her husband's funeral pyre volumes have 
been written on the lot of the Indian widow. To-day 
in some cases the power of Christianity has awakened 
the spirit of social reform and the rigors of widow- 
hood are lessened. Among the majority the old re- 
mains. In general, the higher you rise in the social 
scale, the sterner the conventions and fashions of 
widowhood become. 

In Madras you may visit a Widow's Home, where 
through the wise efforts of a large-hearted woman in 
the Educational Department of Government more 
than a hundred Brahman girl-widows live the life of 
a normal schoolgirl. No fastings, no shaven heads, 
no lack of pretty clothes or jewels mark them off from 
the rest of womanhood. Schools and colleges open 
their doors and professional life as teacher or doctor 
offers hope of human contact and interest for these 
to whom husband and child and home are forever 
forbidden. In all India you may find a very few 
such institutions, but "what are these among so 
many?" The milhons of repressed child widows still 
go on. 

Wives of the Worse is the fate of those whose 
Idol. Karma condemns them to a life of 

religious prostitution. Perhaps the first-born son of 
the family lies near to death. The parents vow a 
frantic vow to the deity of the local temple. "Save 



26 Lighted to Lighten 

our son's life, O Govinda; our youngest daughter 
shall be dedicated to thy service." The son recovers, 
the vow must be fulfilled, and bright-eyed, laughing 
Lakshmi, aged eight, is led to the temple, put through 
the mockery of a ceremony of marriage to the black 
and misshapen image in the inmost shrine, and thence- 
forth trained to a religious service of nameless in- 
famy. 

The story of Hinduism holds the history of some 
devout seekers after God, of sincere aspiration, in 
some cases of beautiful thought and life. This deep- 
est blot is acknowledged and condemned by its better 
members. Yet in countless temples, under the bright- 
ness of the Indian sun, the iniquity, protected by 
vested interests, goes on and no hand is lifted to stay. 
Suppose each American church to shelter its own 
house of prostitution, its forces recruited from the 
young girls of the congregation, their services at the 
disposal of its worshippers. The thought is too black 
for utterance; yet just so in the life of India has the 
service of the gods been prostituted to the lusts of men. 

Reform. The achievements of Christianity in 

India are not confined to the four million who consti- 
tute the community that have followed the new Way. 
Perhaps even greater has been the reaction it has ex- 
cited in the ranks of Hinduism among those who would 
repudiate the name of Christian, Chief among the 
abuses of Hinduism to be attacked has been the tra- 
ditional attitude toward woman. Child marriage and 



Yesterday and To-day 27 

compulsory widowhood are condemned by every social 
reformer up and down the length of India. The battle 
is fought not only for women, but by them also. Agi- 
tation for the suffrage has been carried on in India's 
chief cities. In Poona not long since the educated 
women of the city, Hindu, Muhammadan, and Chris- 
tian, joined in a procession with banners, demanding 
compulsory education for girls. 

Of women not Christian, but freed from ancient 
bonds by this reflex action of Christian thought, per- 
haps the most eminent example is Mrs. Sarojini Naidu. 
Of Brahman birth, but English education, she dared 
to resist the will of her family and the tradition of her 
caste and marry a man of less than Brahman extrac- 
tion. Now as a writer of distinction second only to 
Tagore she is known to Europe as well as to India. 
In her own country she is perhaps loved best for her 
intense patriotism, and is the best known woman con- 
nected with the National Movement. 

Chiefly, however, it is among the Christian com- 
munity that woman's freedom has become a fact. 
Women such as Mrs. Naidu exist, but they are few. 
Now and then one reads of a case of widow-remar- 
riage successfully achieved. Too often, however, the 
Hindu reformer, however well-meaning and sincere, 
talks out his reformation in words rather than deeds. 
He lacks the support of Christian public opinion; he 
lacks also the vitalizing power of a personal Christian 
experience. It is easy to speak in public on the evils 
of early marriage; he speaks and the audience ap- 



38 Lighted to Lighten 

plauds. He knows too well that in the applauding 
audience there is not a man whose son will marry his 
daughter if she passes the age of twelve. So the ardent 
reformer talks on, with the abandon of the darky 
preacher who exhorted his audience "Do as I say and 
not as I do"; and hopes that in some future incar- 
nation life will be kinder, and he may be able to carry 
out the excellent practices he really desires. 

A Hindu girl of high family was allowed to go to 
college. There being then no women's college in her 
part of India, she entered a Government University 
in a large city, where there were a few other women 
students. Western standards of freedom prevailed 
and were accepted by men and women. Rukkubai 
shared in social as well as academic life. With a 
strong arm and a steady eye, she distinguished herself 
at tennis and badminton, and came even to play in 
mixed doubles, a mark of the most "advanced" social 
views to be found in India. 

After college came marriage to a man connected 
with the family of a well known rajah. The husband 
was not only the holder of a University degree similar 
to her own, but a zealous social reformer, eloquent in 
his advocacy of women's freedom. Life promised well 
for Rukkubai. A year or two later a friend visited her 
behind the purdah, with the doors of the world shut 
in her face. The zeal of the reforming husband could 
not stand against the petty persecutions of the older 
women of the family. "I wish," said Rukkubai, "that 




WILL LIFE BE KIND TO HER? 



Yesterday and To-day 29 

I had never known freedom. Now I have known — 
and lost." 

Yet not all reformers are such. There are an in- 
creasing number whose deeds keep pace with their 
words. Such may be found among the members of 
The Servants of India Society, who spend part of the 
year in social studies; the remainder in carrying to 
ignorant people the message they have learned. 

Such is the heritage of the Hindu woman of ancient 
freedom ; centuries when traditions of repression have 
gripped with ever-tightening hold; to-day a new fer- 
ment in the blood, a new striving toward purposes half 
realized. 

Of to-morrow, who can say? The future is hidden, 
but the chapters that follow may perhaps serve to bring 
us into touch with a few of the many forces that are 
helping to shape the day that shall be. 



CHAPTER TWO 

At School 

Hindu or I^i the last chapter we have spoken 

Christian. of the Hindu girl as yet untouched 

by Christianity, save as such influence may have fil- 
tered through into the general life of the nation. We 
have had vague glimpses of her social inheritance, 
with its traditions of an ancient and honorable estate 
of womanhood ; of the Hmitations of her life to-day ; of 
her half-formed aspirations for the future. 

Of education as such nothing has been said. As we 
turn now from home to school life, we shall turn also 
from the Hindu community to the Christian. This 
does not mean that none but Christian girls go to 
school. In all the larger and more advanced cities and 
in some towns you will find Government schools for 
Hindu girls as well as those carried on by private en- 
terprise, some of them of great efficiency. Yet this 
deliberate turning to the school life of the Christian 
community is not so arbitrary as it seems. 

In the first place, the proportion of literacy among 
Christian women is far higher than among the Hindu 
and Muhammadan communities. Again, because a 
large proportion of Christians have come from the de- 
pressed classes, the "submerged tenth," ground for 
uncounted centuries under the heel of the caste sys- 
tem, their education is also a study in social uplift, one 

31 



32 Lighted to Lighten 

of the biggest sociological laboratory experiments to 
be found anywhere on earth. And, lastly, it is through 
Christian schools that the girls and women of America 
have reached out hands across the sea and gripped 
their sisters of the East. 

The School "And the dawn comes up like thunder 

under the Palm Outer China 'cross the Bay." 
Trees. Far from China and far inland from 

the Bay is this South Indian village, but the dawn 
flashes up with the same amazing §wiftness. Life's 
daily resurrection proceeds rapidly in the Village of 
the Seven Palms. Flocks of crows are swarming in 
from their roosting place in the palmyra jungle beside 
the dry sand river ; the cattle are strolling out from be- 
hind various enclosures where they share the family 
shelter; all around is the whirr of bird and insect as 
the teeming life of the tropics wakes to greet "my lord 
Sun." 

Under the thatch of each mud-walled hovel of the 
outcaste village there is the same stir of the returning 
day. Sheeted corpses stretched on the floor suddenly 
come to life and the babel of village gossip begins. 

In the house at the far end of the street, Arul is 
first on her feet, first to rub the sleep from her eyes. 
There is no ceremony of dressing, no privacy in which 
to conduct it if there were. Arul rises in the same 
scant garment in which she slept, snatches up the pot 
of unglazed clay that stands beside the door, poises it 
lightly on her hip, and runs singing to the village well, 



^^^1^ CI 




At School 33 

where each house has its representative waiting for the 
morning supply. There is the plash of dripping water, 
the creak of wheel and straining rope, and the chatter 
of girl voices. 

The well is also the place for making one's morning 
toilet. Arul dashes the cold water over her face, 
hands, and feet. No soap is required, no towel — the 
sun is shining and will soon dry everything in sight. 
Next comes the tooth-brushing act, when a smooth 
stick takes the place of a brush, and "Kolynos" or 
"Colgate" is replaced by a dab of powdered charcoal. 
Arul combs her hair only for life's great events, such 
as a wedding or a festival, and changes her clothes so 
seldom that it is better form not to mention it. 

Breakfast is equally simple, — and the "simple life" 
at close range is apt to lose many of its charms. In 
the corner of the one windowless room that serves for 
all domestic purposes stands the earthen pot of black 
gruel. It is made from the ragi, little, hard, round 
seeds that resemble more than anything else the rape 
seed fed to a canary. It looks a sufficiently unappe- 
tizing breakfast, but contentment abounds because the 
pot is full, and that happens only when rains are 
abundant and seasons prosperous. The Russian 
peasant and his black bread, the Indian peasant and his 
black gruel — dark symbols these of the world's hunger 
line. 

There is no sitting down to share even this simple 
meal, no conception of eating as a social event, a 
family sacrament. The father, as lord and master, 



34 Lighted to Lighten 

must be served first ; then the children seize the one or 
two cups by turn, and last of all comes Mother. Arul 
gulps her breakfast standing and then dashes into the 
street. She is one of the village herd girls ; the sun is 
up and shining hot, and the cattle and goats are jostling 
one another in their impatience to be ofif for the day. 

The dry season is on and all the upland pastures are 
scorched and brown. A mile away is the empty bed 
of the great tank. A South Indian tank in our par- 
lance would be an artificial lake. A strong earth wall, 
planted with palmyras, encircles its lower slope. The 
upper lies open to receive surface water, as well as 
the channel for the river that runs full during the mon- 
soon months. During the "rains" the country is full 
of water, blue and sparkling. Now the water is gone, 
the crops are ripening, and in the clay tank bottom the 
cattle spend their days searching for the last blades of 
grass. 

"Watch the cows well. Little Brother," calls Arul, 
as she hurries back on the narrow path that winds be- 
tween boulders and thickets of prickly pear cactus. 
Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and 
overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels mo- 
tionless in the vivid blue. The sun is blazing now, but 
Arul runs unheeding. It is time for school — she 
knows it by the sun-clock in the sky. "Female educa- 
tion," as the Indian loves to call it, is not yet fashion- 
able in the Village of the Seven Palms. With twenty- 
five boys there are only three girls who frequent its 
halls of learning. Of the three Arul is one. Her 



At School 35 

father, lately baptized, knows but little of what 
Christ's religion means, but the few facts he has 
grasped are written deeply in his simple mind and 
show life-results. One of these ideas is that the way 
out and up is through the gate of Christian education. 
And so it is that Arul comes to school. She is but eight, 
yet with a mouth to feed and a body to clothe, and the 
rice pot often empty, the halving of her daily wage 
means self-denial to all the family. So it is that Arul, 
instead of herding cattle all day, runs swiftly back to 
the one-roomed schoolhouse under the cocoanuts and 
arrives not more than half an hour late. 

The schoolroom is so primitive that you would 
hardly recognize it as such. Light and air and space 
are all too little. There are no desks or even benches. A 
small, wooden blackboard and the teacher's table and 
rickety chair are all that it can boast in the way of 
equipment. The only interesting thing in sight is the 
children themselves, rows of them on the floor, writing 
letters in the sand. Unwashed they are, uncombed and 
almost unclothed, but with all the witchery of child- 
hood in their eyes. In that bare room lies the possi- 
bility of transforming the life of the Village of the 
Seven Palms. 

But the teacher is innocent of the ways of modern 
pedagogy, and deep and complicated are the snares of 
the Tamil alphabet v/ilh its two hundred and sixteen 
elusive characters. Baffiinj, too, are the mysteries of 
number combination. "If six mangoes cost three 
annas, how much will one mango cost?" Arul never 



36 Lighted to Lighten 

had an anna of her own, how should she know ? The 
teacher's bamboo falls on her hard, little hand, and two 
hot tears run down and drop on the cracked slate. The 
way to learning is long and beset with as many thorns 
as the crooked path through the prickly pear cactus. 
Bible stories are happier. Arul can tell you how the 
Shepherds sang and all about the little boy who gave 
his own rice cakes and dried fish, to help Jesus feed 
hungry people. She has been hungry so often that 
that story seems real. 

The years pass over Arul's head, leaving her a little 
taller, a little fleeter of foot as she hurries back from 
the pasture, a little wiser in the ways of God and men. 
Still her father holds out against the inducements of 
child labor, Arul shall go to school as long as there is 
anything left for her to learn. And into Arul's eyes 
there has come the gleam of a great ambition. She 
will leave the Village of the Seven Palms and go into 
the wide world. The most spacious existence she 
knows of is represented by the Girls' Boarding School 
in the town twenty miles away. To enter that school, 
to study, to become a teacher perhaps — ^but beyond that 
the wings of Arul's imagination have not yet learned to 
soar. The meaning of service for Christ and India, 
the opportunity of educated womanhood, such ideas 
have not yet entered Arul's vocabulary. She will learn 
them in the days to come. 

Countless villages of the Seven Palms; countless 
schools badly equipped and poorly taught; countless 
Aruls — feeling within them dim gropings, half-formed 




< 

> 

CO 

O 

o 
<J 



w 

O 

w 
o 

« 
O 
w 

w 
w 

H 



At School 37 

ambitions. Somewhere in America there are girls 
trained in rural education and longing for the chance 
for research and original work in a big, untried field. 
What a chance for getting together the girl and the 
task! 

A High School 

Where the Girls ^^ the girls of India could pass you in 
Come from. long procession, you would need to 

count up to one hundred before you found one who had 
had Arul's opportunity of learning just to read and 
write. Infinitely smaller is the proportion of those 
who go into secondary schools. American women 
have been responsible for founding, financing, and 
teaching many of the Girls' High Schools that exist. 
They are of various sorts. Some have new and up-to- 
date plants, modelled on satisfactory types of Ameri- 
can buildings. Others are muddling along with old- 
time, out-grown schoolrooms, spilling over into 
thatched sheds, and longing for the day when the 
spiritual structure they are erecting will be expressed 
in a suitable material form. Schools vary also as to 
social standing, discipline, and ideals; yet there are 
common features and problems, and one may be more 
or less typical of all. Most include under one organi- 
zation everything from kindergarten to senior high 
school, so that the school is really a big family of one 
or two or four hundred, as the case may be. 

The girls come from many grades of Indian life. 
The great majority are Christians, for few Hindu 



38 Lighted to Lighten 

parents are yet sufficiently "advanced" to desire a high 
school education for their daughters, and those who do 
usually send their girls to a Government school where 
caste regulations will be observed and where there 
will be no religious teaching. 

Some of the Christian girls come from origins as 
crude as that of Arul. To such the simplest elements 
of hygiene are unknown, and cleanly and decent living 
is the first and hardest lesson to be learned. Others are 
orphans, waifs, and strays cast up from the currents of 
village life. Uncared for, undernourished, with mem- 
ories of a tragic childhood behind them, it is sometimes 
an impossible task to turn these little, old women back 
into normal children. But the largest number are chil- 
dren of teachers and catechists, pastors, and even col- 
lege professors, who come from middle class homes, 
with a greater or less collection of Christian habits and 
ideals. With all these is a small scattering of high 
caste Hindu girls, the children of exceptionally liberal 
parents. The resulting school community is a won- 
derful example of pure democracy. Ignorant village 
girls learn more from the "public opinion" of their bet- 
ter trained schoolmates than from any amount of for- 
mal discipline; while daughters of educated famiHes 
share their inheritance and come to realize a little of 
the need of India's illiterate masses. So school life be- 
comes an experiment in Christian democracy, where a 
girl counts only for what she can do and be; where 
each member contributes something to the life of the 
group and receives something from it. 



A High School 39 

What the Girls Schools are schools the world over, 
Study. and the agonies of the three R's are 

common to children in whatever tongue they learn. 
An Indian kindergarten is not so different from an 
American, except for language and local color. Equip- 
ment is far simpler and less expensive, but there is the 
same spontaneity, the same joy of living; laughter and 
play have the same sound in Tamil as in English. Be- 
sides, Indian kindergartens produce some charming 
materials all their own — shiny black tamarind seeds, 
piles of colored rice, and palm leaves that braid into 
baby rattles and fans. 

So, too, a high school course is much the same even 
in India. The right-angled triangle still has an hypote- 
nuse, and quadratics do not simplify with distance, 
while Tamil classics throw Vergil and Cicero into the 
shade. The fact that high school work is all carried 
on in English is the biggest stumbling block in the 
Indian schoolgirl's road to learning. What would the 
American girl think of going through a history reci- 
tation in Russian, writing chemistry equations in 
French, or demonstrating a geometry proposition in 
Spanish? Some day Indian education may be con- 
ducted in its own vernaculars ; to-day there are neither 
the necessary text-books, nor the vocabulary to express 
scientific thought. As yet, and probably for many 
years to come, the English language is the key that un- 
locks the House of Learning to the schoolgirl. Indian 
classics she has and they are well worth knowing; but 
even Shakespeare and Milton would hardly console the 



40 Lighted to Lighten 

American girl for the loss of all her story books, from 
"Little Women" and "Pollyanna" up — or down — to 
the modern novel. To understand English sufficiently 
to write and speak and even think in it is the big job of 
the High School. It is only the picked few who attain 
unto it; those few are possessed of brains and perse- 
verance enough to become the leaders of the next gen- 
eration. 

School Life. It is not unusual for an Indian girl 

to spend ten or twelve years in such a boarding school. 
An institution is a poor substitute for a home, but in 
such cases it must do its best to combine the two. This 
means that books are almost accessories; school life 
is the most vital part of education. 

To such efforts the Indian girl responds almost in- 
credibly. Whatever her faults — and she has many — 
she is never bored. Her own background is so narrow 
that school opens to her a new world of surprise. 
"Isn't it wonderful!" is the constant reaction to the 
commonplaces of science. No less wonderful to her 
is the liberty of thinking and acting for herself that 
self-government brings. 

Seeta loves her home, but before a month is over its 
close confinement palls and she writes back, "I am liv- 
ing like a Muhammadan woman. I wish it were the 
last day of vacation." Her father is shocked by her 
desire to be up and doing. He calls on the school prin- 
cipal and complains, "I don't know what to make of 
my daughter. Why is she not like her mother? Are 



A High School 41 

not cooking and sewing enough for any woman ? Why 
has she these strange ideas about doing all sorts of 
things that her mother never wanted to do ?" Then the 
principal tries to explain patiently that new wine can- 
not be kept in old bottles, and that unless the daughter 
were to be different from the mother it was hardly 
worth while to send her for secondary education. So, 
when the long holiday is over, Seeta returns with a 
fresh appreciation of what education means in her 
life ; and we know that when her daughters come home 
for vacation, it will be to a mother with sympathy and 
understanding. 

The girls' loyalty to their school is at times almost 
pathetic. An American teacher writes, "One moon- 
light night when I was walking about the grounds 
talking with some of the oldest girls, one of them 
caught my hand, and turned me about toward the 
school, which, even under the magic of the Indian 
moon, did not seem a particularly beautiful sight to me. 
'Amma' (mother), she said, in a voice quivering with 
emotion, 'See how beautiful our school is ! When I 
stand out here at night and look at it through the trees, 
it gives me such a feeling here/ and she pressed her 
hand over her heart. 

" 'Do you think it is only beautiful at night?' one of 
the other girls asked indignantly, and all joined in en- 
thusiastic affirmations of its attractions even at high 
noon, — which all goes to show how relative the matter 
is. I, with my background of Wellesley lawns and 
architecture, find our school a hopelessly unsanitary 



42 Lighted to Lighten 

makeshift to be endured patiently for a few years 
longer, but to these girls with their background of 
wretchedly poor village homes it is in its bare clean- 
liness, as well as in its associations, a veritable place of 
'sweetness and light/ " 

Athletics. Organized play is one of the gifts 

that school life brings to India. It, too, has to be 
learned, for the Indian girl has had no home training 
in initiative. The family or the caste is the unit and 
she is a passive member of the group, whose supreme 
duty is implicit obedience. One Friday when school 
had just reopened after the Christmas vacation, one of 
the teachers came to the principal and said, "May we 
stop all classes this afternoon and let the children play ? 
You see," as, she saw remonstrance forthcoming, "it's 
just because it's been vacation. They say they have 
been so long at home and there has been no chance to 
play." Classes were stopped, and all the school played, 
from the greatest unto the least, until the newly 
aroused instinct was satisfied. 

Basket ball had an interesting history in one school. 
At first the players were very weak sisters, indeed. The 
center who was knocked down wept as at a personal 
affront, and the defeated team also wept to prove their 
penitence for their defeat. But gradually the team 
learned to play fair, to take hard knocks, and to cheer 
the winners. They grew into such "good sports" that 
when one day an invading cow, aggrieved at being hit 
in the flank by a flying ball, turned and knocked the 



A High School 43 

goal thrower flat on the ground, the interruption lasted 
only a few minutes. The prostrate goal-thrower re- 
covered her breath, got over her fright, and, while 
admiring friends chased the cow to a safe distance, the 
game went on to the finish. 

Dramatics. The dramatic instinct is strong and 

the school girl actress shines, whether in the role of 
Ophelia or Ramayanti. In India among Hindus or 
Christians, in school or church or village, musical 
dramas are frequently composed and played and hold 
unwearied audiences far into the night. Among Chris- 
tians there is a great fondness for dramatizing Bible 
narratives. Joseph, Daniel, and the Prodigal Son ap- 
pear in wonderful Indian settings, "adapted" some- 
times almost beyond recognition. They show inter- 
esting Hkeness to the miracle and mystery plays of the 
Middle Ages. There is the same naive presentation; 
the same introduction of the bufifoon to offset tragedy 
with comedy ; the same tendency to overemphasize the 
comic parts until all sense of reverence is lost. In 
some respects India and Mediaeval Europe are not so 
far apart. 

A high school class one night presented part of the 
old Tamil drama of Harischandra. The heroine, an 
exiled queen, watches her child die before her in the 
forest. Having no money to pay for cremation on the 
burning ghat, she herself gathers firewood, builds a 
little pyre, and with such tears and lamentations as 
befit an Oriental woman lays her child's body on the 



44 Lighted to Lighten 

funeral pile. Just as the fire is lighted and the corpse 
begins to burn, the keeper of the burning ghat appears 
and, with anger at this trespass, kicks over the pyre, 
puts the fire out, and throws the body aside. Just at 
this moment Chandramathy sees in him the exiled king, 
her husband and lord, and the father of her dead child. 
There are tearful recognitions; together they gather 
again the scattered firewood, rebuild the pyre, and 
share their common grief. 

The play was given in a dimly lighted court, with 
simple costumes and the crudest stage properties. But 
one spectator will not soon forget the schoolgirl hero- 
ine whose masses of black hair swept to her knees. She 
lived again all the pathos, the anger and despair and 
reconciliation of the old tale, and her audience thrilled 
with her as at the touch of a tragedy queen. 

Student Co-operation in school government 

Government. and discipline is one of the most edu- 

cational experiences that an Indian girl can pass 
through. To feel the responsibility for her own ac- 
tions and those of her schoolmates, to form impersonal 
judgments that have no relation to one's likes and dis- 
likes, these are lessons found not between the covers 
of text-books, but at the very heart of life-experience. 
Under such moral strain and stress character de- 
velops, not as a hothouse growth of unreal dreams and 
theories, but as the sturdy product of Hfe situations. 

Some schools divide themselves into groups, each of 
which elects a "queen" to represent and to rule. The 




PRIESTS OF THE HINDU TEMPLE 



A High School 45 

queens with elected teachers and the principal form 
the governing body, before which all questions of disci- 
pline come for settlement. Great is the office of a 
queen. She is usually well beloved, but also at times 
well hated, for the "Court" occasionally dispenses 
punishments far heavier than the teachers alone would 
dare to inflict and its members often realize the truth 
of Shakespeare's statement, "Uneasy lies the head that 
wears a crown." 

The "Court" is now in session and has two culprits 
before its bar. Abundance has been found to have a 
cake of soap and a mirror, not her own, shut up in her 
box. Lotus copied her best friend's composition and 
handed it in as hers. What shall be done to the two? 
Discussion waxes hot. The play hour passes. Shouts 
and laughter come in from the tennis court and the 
basket ball field. Every one is having a good time save 
the culprits and the four queens, who pay the penalty 
of greatness and bear on their young shoulders the 
burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for 
the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there 
are other complications. Abundance stole things 
which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was 
only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abun- 
dance comes from a no-account family, quite "down 
and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as 
such entitled to due respect and deference. And still 
further, nobody likes Abundance, while Lotus is very 
popular and counts one of the queens as her intimate 
friend. Much time passes, the supper bell rings, and 



46 Lighted to Lighten 

the players troop noisily indoors, but the four bur- 
dened queens still struggle with their dawning sense 
of justice. At last, as the swift darkness drops, the 
case is closed and judgment pronounced. Much time 
has been consumed, but four girls have learned a few 
of life's big lessons, not found in books, such as : that 
thoughts are just as real as things; that likes and dis- 
likes have nothing to do with matters of discipline; 
that a girl of a "way up" family should have more ex- 
pected of her than one who is "down and out." Per- 
haps that experience will count more than any 
"original" in geometry. 

Student Government also brings about a wonderful 
comradeship between teachers and pupils. Out of it 
has grown such a sense of friendly freedom as found 
expression in this letter written to its American teacher 
by a Junior Class who were more familiar with the 
meter of Evangeline than with the geometry lesson 
assigned. 

Dear Miss : 



We are the Math, students who made you lose youf 
temper this morning, and we feel very sorry for that. 
We found that we are the girls who must be blamed. 
We ought to have told you the matter beforehand, but 
we didn't, so please excuse us for the fault which we 
committed and we realize now. Our love to you. 

V Form Math. Girls. 

P. S. We would like to quote a poem which we are 
very much interested in telling you : 



A High School 47 

"What is that that ye do, my children ? 
What madness has seized you this morning? 
Seven days have I labored among you. 
Not in word alone, but showing the figures on the 

board. 
Have you so soon forgotten all the definitions of Loci? 
Is this the fruit of my teaching and laboring?" 

Co-operative Co-operation is needed not only in 

Housekeeping. "being good," but also in eating and 
drinking and keeping clean. There are school families 
in India where every member from the "queen" to the 
most rollicking five-year-old has her share in making 
things go. The queen takes her turn in getting up at 
dawn to see that the "water set" is at the well on time ; 
five-year-old Tara wields her diminutive broom in her 
own small corner, and each is proud of her share. 
There is in Indian life an unfortunate feud between 
the head and the hand. To be "educated" means to be 
lifted above the degradation of manual labor; to work 
with one's hands means something lacking in one's 
brain. Not seldom does a schoolboy go home to his 
village and sit idle while his father reaps the rice crop. 
Not seldom does an "educated" girl spend her vaca- 
tion in letter writing and crochet work while her "un- 
educated" mother toils over the family cooking. 

Girls, however, who have spent hours over the the- 
ories of food values, balanced meals, and the nutri- 
tion of children, and other hours over the practical 
working out of the theories in the big school family, go 



48 Lighted to Lighten 

home with a changed attitude toward the work of the 
house. Siromony writes back at Christmas time, 
"The first thing I did after reaching home was to 
empty out the house and whitewash it." 

Ruth's letter in the summer vacation ends, "We have 
given our mother a month's hoHday. All she needs to 
do is to go to the bazaar and buy supplies. My sister 
and I will do all the rest." 

On Christmas day, Miracle, who is spending her 
vacation at school, all on her own initiative gets up at 
three in the morning to kill chickens and start the curry 
for the orphans' dinner, so that the work may be well 
out of the way before time for the Christmas tree and 
church. 

Golden Jewel begs the use of the sewing machine in 
the Mission bungalow. All the days before Christmas 
her bare feet on the treadle keep the wheels whirring. 
Morning and afternoon she is at it, for Jewel has a 
quiver full of little brothers and sisters, and in India 
no one can go to church on Christmas without a new 
and holiday-colored garment. One after another they 
come from Jewel's deft fingers and lie on the floor in 
a rainbow heap. When Christmas Eve comes all are 
finished — except her own. On Christmas morning all 
the family are in church at that early service dearest to 
the Indian Christian, with its decorations of palm and 
asparagus creeper, its carols and rejoicings and new 
and shining raiment. In the midst sits Jewel and her 
clothes to the most seem shabby, but to those who 
know she is the best dressed girl in the whole church, 



Tamil Girls Preparing for College 



k, 




The Village of the Seven Palms 



A High School 49 

for she is wearing a new spiritual garment of unselfish 
service. 

The Indian Girl's To the Indian schoolgirl religion is the 
Religion. natural atmosphere of life. She dis- 

cusses her faith with as little self-consciousness as if 
she were choosing the ingredients for the next day's 
curry. She knows nothing of those Western conven- 
tions that make it "good form" for us to hide all our 
emotions, all our depth of feeling, under the mask of 
not caring at all. She has none of that inverted hypoc- 
risy which causes us to take infinite pains to assure our 
world that we are vastly worse than we are. What 
Lotus feels she expresses simply, naturally, be it her 
interest in biology, her friendship for you, or her re- 
sponse to the love of the All-Father. And that re- 
sponse is deep and genuine. There is a spiritual qual- 
ity, an answering vibration, which one seldom finds 
outside the Orient. You lead morning prayers and 
to pray is easy, because in those schoolgirl worshippers 
you feel the mystic quality of the East leaping up in 
response. You teach a Bible class and the girls' eager 
questions run ahead so fast that you lose your breath 
as you try to keep pace. 

The following letter was written by a girl just after 
her first experience of a mountain climb with a vaca- 
tion camp at the top. "Now we are on Kylasa, enjoy- 
ing our 'mountain top experience,' This morning 

Miss gave a beautiful and inspiring talk on visions. 

She showed us that the climbing up Kylasa could be a 



50 Lighted to Lighten 

parable of our journey through this world. In places 
where it was steep and where we were tired, the curi- 
osity we had to see the full vision on the top kept us 
courageous to go forward and not sit long in any place. 
She compared this with our difficulties and dark times 
and this impressed me most, I think. 

"When we came up it was dark and I was supposed 
to come in the chair, but I did not wait for it, because 
I was very curious to go up. When I came to a place 
very dark, with bushes and trees very thick on both 
sides, I had to give up and wait until the others came. 
When I was waiting I saw the big, almost red moon 
coming, stealing its way through the dark clouds little 
by little. It was really glorious. I thought of this 

when Miss talked to us, and it made it easier to 

understand her feeling about that. 

"So much of that, and now I want to tell you about 
the steep rocks I am climbing these days," and then 
follows the application to the big "Hill Difficulty" that 
was blocking up her own life path. 

God in Nature. Love of nature is not as spontaneous 
in the Indian girl as in the Japanese. Yet with but a 
little training of the seeing eye and understanding 
heart, there develops a deep love of beauty that in- 
cludes alike flowers and birds, sunsets and stars. A 
High School senior thus expressed her thoughts about 
it at the final Y. W. C. A. meeting of the year. 

"Nature stands before our eyes to make us feel 
God's presence. I feel God's presence very close when 



A High School 51 

I happen to see the glorious sunset and bright moon- 
light night when everybody around me is sleeping. I 
think Nature gives a much greater and more glorious 
impression about God than any sermon. 

"Whenever I felt troubled or worried, I did not 
often read the Bible or prayer book, but I wanted to 
go alone to some quiet place from where I could see 
the broad, bright blue sky with all its mysteries and 
green trees and gray mountains with fields and forests 
around them. 

"I think Nature is the best comforter and preacher 
of God. When we are too tired to learn our lessons 
or to do our duty, we can go alone for a safe distance 
where God waits for us to strengthen us. It is hard 
for me to sit and think about God in the class room, 
where everybody is speaking, and the class books and 
sums on the board attract my attention, or make me 
feel useless because I was not able to do them as 
nicely as others in my class. But, if we go away from 
all these, our friend Nature jumps up and greets us 
with new greetings. The cool wind and the pretty 
birds and wonderful little flowers and giant-Hke rocks 
help us to feel the presence of God. We cannot appre- 
ciate all these when we are walking with the crowd 
and talking and playing, but, if we are left alone when 
we go out to see God, then even the stones and tiny 
flowers which we often see look like a mystery to us. 
In thinking about them we can feel the wisdom of 
God." 

Crude as the English may be, the spiritual percep- 



52 Lighted to Lighten 

tion is not so different from that of the English lad 
who cried, 

"My heart leaps up when I behold 
A rainbow in the sky." 

Religion made Religious feeling and expression may 
Practical. be natural to the Indian mind, but 

how about its transfer to the affairs of the common 
day? It is a hard enough proposition for any of us, 
be we from the East or the West; to make the diffi- 
culty even greater, the Indian girl is heir to a religious 
system in which religion and morals may be kept in 
water-tight compartments. Where the temples shelter 
"protected" prostitution and the wandering "holy 
man" may break all the Ten Commandments with im- 
punity, it is hard to learn that the worship of God 
means right living. Harder than irregular verbs or 
English idioms is the fundamental lesson that the 
Bible class on Sunday has a vital connection with hon- 
est work in arithmetic on Monday, the settling of a 
quarrel on Tuesday, and the thorough sweeping of the 
schoolroom on Wednesday. Right here it is that we 
see "the grace of God" at work in the hearts of big 
girls and middle-sized girls and little children from the 
villages. When classes can be left to take examina- 
tions unsupervised, a big step forward is marked. 
When before Communion Sunday the "queens" of 
their own initiative settle up the school quarrels and 
"make peace," one has the glad feeling that a little bit 



A High School 53 

of the Kingdom of God has come in one small corner 
of the earth. 

"Among you as Religious emotion may find one of its 
He that serveth." normal outlets in personal right-liv- 
ing. That is good as far as it goes, but yet not enough. 
It must seek expression also in making life better for 
other people. The Indian schoolgirl lives in the midst 
of a vast social laboratory, surrounded by problems 
that are overwhelmingly intricate. What is her educa- 
tion worth? Islothing, if it leads to a cloistered se- 
clusion; everything, if it brings her into vital healing 
touch with even one of its needs. 

The spirit of Christian social service opens many 
doors. There are Sunday afternoons to be spent with 
the shy pupils of the High Caste Girls' Schools at the 
opposite end of town. In the outcaste village beside 
the rice fields we may find the other end of the social 
scale — twenty or thirty little barbarians whose open- 
ing exercises must start off with a compulsory bath at 
the well. 

Vacation weeks at home are bristling with oppor- 
tunity — the woman next door whose forgotten art of 
reading may be revived; the bride in the next street 
who longs to learn crochet work; the little troop of 
neighbor children who crowd the house to learn the 
haunting strains of a Christian lyric. A cholera epi- 
demic breaks out, and, instead of blind fear of a 
demon-goddess to be placated, there is practical knowl- 
edge as to methods of guarding food and drinking 



54 Lighted to Lighten 

water. The baby of the house is ill and, instead of 
exorcisms and branding with hot irons, there is a 
visit to the nearest hospital and enough knowledge of 
hygienic laws to follow out the doctor's directions. 

Rebecca teaches a class of small boys in the outcaste 
Sunday school that gives preliminary baths. On this 
particular Sunday, however, she starts out armed not 
with the picture roll and lyric book, but with a motley 
collection of soap and clean rags, cotton swabs and 
iodine and ointment. 

"Amma," says Rebecca, "in the little thatched house, 
the fourth beyond the school, I saw a boy whose head is 
covered with sores. May Zipporah teach my class to- 
day, while I go and treat the sores, as I have learned to 
do in school?" So Rebecca, following in the steps of 
Him who sent out His disciples not only to preach 
but also to heal, attacks one of the little strongholds of 
dirt and disease and carries it by storm. No young 
surgeon after his first successful major operation was 
ever prouder than Rebecca when the next Sunday eve- 
ning she rushes into the bungalow, eyes shining, to 
report her cure complete. 

Is there somewhere an American girl who longs 
to "do things"? A little plumbing — or its equivalent 
in a land where no plumbing is ; a little bossing of the 
carpenter, the mason, the builder ; a great deal of "high 
finance" in raising one dollar to the purchasing power 
of two ; a deal of administration with need for endless 
tact; the teaching of subjects known and unknown, — 
largely the latter ; a vast amount of mothering and a 



A High School 55 

proportionate return in the love of children; days 
bristling with problems, and nights when one sinks into 
bed too tired to think or feel — there you have it, with 
much more. More because it means opportunity for 
creative work — creative as one helps to mould the new 
education of new India; creative as one reverently 
helps to fashion some of the lives that are to be new 
India itself. More too, as the rebound comes back to 
one's self in a life too full for loneliness, too obsessing 
for self-interest. Does it pay ? Try it for yourself and 
see. 



The Beginnings of Isabella Thoburn College 

One bright noon in North India, sixty years ago, a young 
missionary on an evangelistic tour among the villages paused 
to rest by the v^^ayside. As he paced up and down beneath the 
tamarind trees, pondering the problem of India's womanhood, 
shut in the zenanas beyond the reach of the Gospel which he 
was bringing to the little _ villages, there fell at his feet a 
feather from a vulture's wing. Picking it up, he whimsically 
cut it into_ a quill. Thinking that his sister in far-away 
America might like a letter from so strange a pen, he went 
into his tent and wrote to her. He told her of the millions 
of girls shut up in those "citadels of heathenism," the zenanas 
of India, — a problem which only Christian women might hope 
to solve. Half playfully, half in earnest, he added, "Why 
don't you come out and help?" As swift as wind and wave 
permitted was Isabella Thoburn's answer, "I am coming as 
soon as the way opens !" 

Already a group of vs^omen, stirred to the depths by the 
words of Mrs. Edwin W. Parker and Mrs. William Butler, 
returned missionaries from India, were forming a Society to 
help the women and girls of Christless lands. At the first 
public meeting of this Woman's Foreign Missionary Society 
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though but twenty women 
were present with but three hundred dollars in the treasury, 
when they learned that Isabella Thoburn, — gifted, consecrated, 
wise, — was ready to go to India, they exclaimed, "Shall we lose 
Miss Thoburn because we have not the needed money in our 
hands to send her? No, rather let us walk the streets of 
Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of more 
costly apparel !" Thus was answered the letter written with 
the feather from the vulture's wing by the wayside in India. 

In 1870, Isabella Thoburn gathered six little waifs into her 
.first school in India, a one-roomed building in the noisy, dusty 
bazaar of Lucknow. From this brave venture have grown 
the Middle School, the High School, and finally in 1886 the 
first woman's Christian College in all Asia, housed in the 
Ruby Garden, Lai Bagh. Here for thirty-one years Isabella 
Thoburn lived and loved and labored for the girls of India, 



56 



CHAPTER THREE 

I. The Garden of Hid Treasure 

Prelude: Why go "Why should an Indian girl want a 
to College? college education?" queried Mary 

Smith, as she listened to her roommate's account of the 
"Lighting of the Christmas Candles." "I can see why 
she would need to learn to read and write, and even 
a high school course I wouldn't mind ; but college seems 
to me perfectly silly, and an awful waste of good 
money. Why, from our own home high school there 
are only six of us at college." 

Mary Smith, fresh from "Main Street," may be less 
provincial than she sounds. Her question puts up a 
real problem. When only one girl in one hundred has a 
chance at the Three R's, is it right to "waste money" on 
giving certain others the chance to delve into psychol- 
ogy and higher mathematics ? When there is not bread 
enough to go around, why should some of the family 
have cake and pudding? 

Something less than a hundred years ago, similar 
questions were vexing the American public. Those 
were the days when Mary Lyon fought her winning 
battle against the champions of the slogan "The home 
is woman's sphere," the days in which the pioneers of 
women's education foregathered from the rocky farm- 
slopes of New England, and Mt. Holyoke came into 
being. Mary Smith, who is duly born, baptized, vac- 

57 



58 Lighted to Lighten 

cinated, and registered for Vassar, the last requiring 
no more volition on her part than the first, realizes little 
of the ancient struggle that has made her privilege a 
matter of course. 

They are much the same old arguments that must be 
gone over again to justify college education for our 
sisters of the East. Rather say argument, in the 
singular, for there is just one that holds, and that is 
the possibilities for service that such education opens 
up. 

High schools there must be in India, but who will 
teach them ? American and English women have never 
yet gone out to India in such numbers as to staff the 
schools they have founded, nor would there be funds 
to support them if they did. Travel through India 
to-day and you will find girls' schools staffed either 
with under-qualified women teachers, or else with men 
whose academic qualifications are satisfactory, but 
who, being men, cannot fill the place where a woman 
is obviously needed. What could be more contradic- 
tory than to find a Christian girls' school, supported 
largely by American money, but staffed by Hindu men, 
just because no Christian women with necessary quali- 
fications are available? 

Hospitals there must be, but where are the doctors to 
conduct them ? Here again, foreign doctors can fill the 
need of the merest fraction of India's suffering wom- 
ankind. But the American doctor can multiply herself 
in just one way. Give her a Medical College, well 
equipped and staffed, and a body of Indian girls with a 



The Garden of Hid Treasure 59 

sufficient background of general education, and instead 
of one doctor and one hospital you will find countless 
centres of healing springing up in city and small town 
and along the roadside where the doctor passes by. 

Leadership there must be among the women of the 
New India. Where will it be found but among those 
women whose powers of initiative have been developed 
by the four years of life in a Christian college ? Church 
workers, pastors' wives, social workers, child welfare 
promoters, where can you find them in India? Here 
and there, scattered in unlikely places, where educated 
women, married and home-making, yet let their surplus 
energy flow out into neighborhood betterment. 

Mothers of families there must be, and far be it 
from me to say that non-college women fail in that 
high office. There comes before me one mother of 
fourteen children who has never seen the inside of a 
college classroom, yet whom it would be hard to excel 
in her quahties of motherliness. But, other things 
being equal, it is to the Christian, educated mothers 
that we turn to find the life of the ideal home, with 
real comradeship between wife and husband, with in- 
telligent understanding of the children, and the covet- 
ing for them of the best that education can give. 

One other question Mary Smith may rightly ask. 
What about the men's colleges already existing? Will 
co-education not work in India ? 

To a certain limited extent it has. Rukkubai, with 
her too brief years of freedom, proved its possibility. 
Others there have been, pioneer souls, who pushed their 



60 Lighted to Lighten 

way into lecture halls crowded with men, took notes 
in the dark and undesirable remnants of space allotted 
to them, and by dint of perseverance and hard work 
passed the examinations of the University and carried 
off the coveted degree. 

They were courageous women, deserving admira- 
tion. They won knowledge, sometimes at heavy cost of 
health and nerve power. They helped to make wom- 
en's education possible. But what of the fairer side of 
college life could they ever know ? They were accepted 
always on sufferance; they never "belonged." One 
such pioneer was a friend of mine. In many walks and 
talks she told me of life in a men's college under the 
patronage of the Maharajah of a native state. Loyal 
to her college, and proud of the treasures of oppor- 
tunity it had opened to her, she yet sighed for what she 
had missed. "When I see the life of the girls in the 
Women's Christian College at Madras," she said, "I 
feel that I have never been to college." 

Three times the girls and women of America have 
reached out hands across the sea and either founded or 
helped to found Christian schools of higher education 
for the women of India, with the belief that they have 
a right to the knowledge of the spiritual truth which 
has brought to Christian women of America develop- 
ment in righteousness, freedom of faith, a personal 
knowledge of God through Jesus Christ, and the 
blessed hope of immortality. 

Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, 1886. 
The Women's Christian College, Madras, 1915. 




^(^! |!^' 




Pi 

w .S 

rv] (U 

" m 

)_; 00 

O " 

O _2 



W 



O 

o 

CO - 

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l-H (p 



The Garden of Hid Treasure 61 

The Vellore Medical School, 1918. 
These three names and dates are red-lettered in the 
history of international friendship, for through them 
the college women of America and India are joined into 
one fellowship of knowledge and service. 

II. LUCKNOW 

Lai Eagh. A dusty journey of a night and almost 

a day brings you from Calcutta across the limitless 
Ganges plains to Lucknow, capital of the ancient king- 
dom of Oudh. Every tourist visits it, making a pious 
pilgrimage first to the Residency, where in the midst of 
green lawns and banyan trees the scarred ruins tell of 
the unforgettable Mutiny days of '57; and then to the 
nearby cemetery, where the dead sleep among the jas- 
mines. Then, if his hours are wisely chosen, the trav- 
eler drives back to the town at sunset when palace 
towers and cupolas, mosque minarets and domes are 
silhouetted against the blazing west in an unrivalled 
skyline. 

The tourist returns to the bazaars and in the midst 
of them, amid the dust and clatter of ekkos and tongas, 
probably passes by a sight more interesting than Resi- 
dency ruins and abandoned palaces — inasmuch as it 
deals with the living present rather than the dead past. 

It was in Lai Bagh, the Ruby Garden of hid treasure, 
that the Nawab Iq bal-ud-dowler, Lord Chamberlain 
to the first king of Oudh, hid, according to report, great 
caskets of silver rupees, with a huge ruby possessed of 



62 Lighted to Lighten 

magic virtues, and left behind him a sheet of detailed 
directions for finding the treasure, with, alas, a post- 
script to explain that all the careful directions were 
quite wrong, being intended to mislead the would-be 
discoverer. It was again in Lai Bagh that Isabella 
Thoburn founded her school for Indian girls, and in 
1886 opened the classes of the first women's college 
for India to possess residence accommodation and a 
staff of women teachers. The buried rupees and the 
magic ruby have never been unearthed; instead these 
years of Lai Bagh history have witnessed the discovery 
of richer treasure in the minds and hearts of young 
women, set free from age-long repressions and sent 
out to share their riches with a world in need. 

You enter Lai Bagh's gates and find yourself before 
a stretch of dull red buildings whose wide-arched ve- 
randahs are built to keep out the fierce suns of May. 
In November the sun has lost its terrors, and you re- 
joice in its warmth as it shines upon the gardens with 
their riot of color — yellow and white chrysanthemums, 
roses, and masses of flaming poinsettias, surely a fair 
setting for the girls who walk amid its changing love- 
liness. 

Cosmopolitan ^s you leave the setting and for a few 
Atmosphere. days merge yourself into the life that 

is going on within, there are a few outstanding impres- 
sions that fasten upon you and persistently mingle with 
Lai Bagh memories. Of these, perhaps, the foremost is 
the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Here you have on the 



LucKNOw 63 

one hand a group of American college women repre- 
senting no one locality, no narrow section of American 
life, but drawn from east and west, north and south. 
On the other side, you see a body of nearly sixty Indian 
students whose homes range all the way from Ceylon 
to the Northwest frontier, from Singapore to Bombay. 
What of the result ? It is an atmosphere where East 
and West meet, not in conflict, but in a spirit of give 
and take, where each re-inforces the other. It is prob- 
ably due to this friendly clash of ideas that the "typical" 
student at Isabella Thoburn strikes the observer as of 
no "type" at all, but a person whose ideas are her own 
and who has a gift for original thinking rare in one's 
experience of Indian girls. In the class forums that 
were held during my visit the most striking element 
was the difference of opinion, and its free expression. 

Scholarship. Lai Bagh is no longer satisfied with 

the production of mere graduates. Her ambition is 
now reaching out to post-graduate study, made possible 
by the gift of an American fellowship. The first to re- 
ceive this honor are two Indian members of the fac- 
ulty, one of them Miss Thillayampalam, Professor of 
Biology, whose home is in far-off Ceylon at the other 
end of India's world. Henceforth, America may expect 
to find each year one member of the Lai Bagh family 
enrolled in some school of graduate work. Such work, 
however, is not to be confined to a scholarship in a 
foreign land, for this year the college enrolls Regina 
Thumboo, its first candidate for the degree of M. A. 



64 Lighted to Lighten 

Her parents, originally from the South, emigrated 
from Madras to Singapore. There Regina was born, 
the youngest of five children. The father, a civil 
engineer in the employ of a local rajah was am- 
bitious for his children, and, seeing in Regina a child 
of unusual promise, sent her first to a Singapore school, 
then on the long journey across to Calcutta and inland 
to Lucknow. At Lai Bagh she stands foremost in 
scholarship. When she has completed her M.A. in 
history and had her year of advanced work in some 
American university, she plans to return to the faculty 
of her Alma Mater. 

Scholarship at Isabella Thoburn Col- 
Social Questions, j^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^j exclusively with the 

dusty records of dead languages and bygone civiliza- 
tions. It is linked up with present questions, and is 
alive to the changing India of to-day. Among the mat- 
ters discussed during my visit were such as : the sub- 
stitution of a vernacular for English in the university 
course; the possibility of a national language for all 
India ; the advisability of co-education ; and the place 
of the unmarried woman in New India. To report all 
that the girls said and wrote would require a book for 
itself, but so far as space allows we will let the girls 
speak for themselves. 

Co-education. The Senior Class of eight discussed 
co-education with great interest, and when the vote 
was taken five were in the affirmative and only three in 
the negative. 



"^ 





\ 



.#''^.:. 






COLLEGE 


O 
o 

■ 1 h^ 


GROUP- 



I— I 

> 
(/) 

< 

O 

o 

CO 



LucKNow 65 

The following paper voices the objections to co-edu- 
cation as expressed by one especially thoughtful 
student : 

"Co-education is an excellent thing, but it can only 
work successfully in those highly civilized countries 
where intellectual and moral strength and freedom of 
intercourse control the lives and thoughts of the stu- 
dent bodies. Unfortunately these fundamental princi- 
ples of co-education are sadly lacking in India. 

"Although woman's education is being pushed for- 
ward with considerable force, for many years to come 
the girls will still be a small minority in comparison 
with the number of boys. Besides, in two or three 
cases where Indian girls have had the privilege of 
studying with the boys, they have told me that, in spite 
of immensely enjoying the competitive spirit and 
broadminded behavior of the boys, they always felt a 
certain strain and strangeness in their company. One 
student attended a history class for full two years and 
yet she never got acquainted with one single boy in her 
class. There is no social intercourse between the two 
parties. If each side does not stand on its own dignity 
in constant fear of overstepping the bounds of eti- 
quette and courtesy, their reputation is bound to be 
marred." 

The arguments for the other side are presented as 
well. The American reader may be interested to see 
that the Indian college girl does not consider Western 
ways perfect, but is quite ready to criticize the manners 
and morals of her American cousin. 



66 Lighted to Lighten 

"Co-education cannot burst upon India like lightning. 
It has to grow gradually in society ; and until there is a 
perfect understanding and sympathy between the sexes, 
this system will not work. 

"Again, co-education should not begin from college. 
The girls come in from high schools where they are 
locked up and have no contact with the outside world ; 
and if they come into such colleges when many of them 
are immature, there will be not only a complete failure 
of the system-, but the result will be fatal in many cases. 
So the system should be introduced from the primary 
department and worked up through the high schools 
and colleges. 

"First, there is the question of chivalry, which is a 
problem that Indian men should solve for themselves. 
But how are they to solve it? If they study with 
women, chivalry would become natural to them. 

"On the other hand, a woman has to learn how to 
receive a man's attention — how far to go in her be- 
havior. The question now is, where can she learn 
this ? Isn't it by mixing and minghng in a place where 
she feels that she is not inferior to man? It is in an 
educational institution that this equality is most keenly 
felt. 

"Closely allied with chivalry Is the question of mod- 
esty. It is commonly said that Indian women have a 
poise, quietness, and reserve different to that in West- 
ern women, 

"Boldness in women is another fact connected with 
the above. Indian men and women should not try to 



LucKNow 67 

follow Western manners. They have hereditary man- 
ners which should not be deserted. Indian women can 
keep their modesty and reserve even while mixing with 
men. If co-education is made a slow development this, 
difficulty will not appear. 

"Secondly, this system will give more facilities to 
woman for various kinds of occupation. She will then 
realize that her education is not confined to her home 
merely, but that she has a right to contribute to human- 
ity just as big a share as any man. With this realization 
there will come efforts on her part to better the condi- 
tion of her country by doing her little share. How 
much a woman can do who has a firm conviction that 
she is not inferior to any one in this life, but that she is 
a contributor to her country, whichsoever vocation she 
follows in life, in that she can do her share ! 

"The third point is that early marriage and widow- 
hood will be lessened in a large degree. While educa- 
tion will teach men and women to reverence their par- 
ents and always consult them, at the same time they will 
learn to choose for themselves. By coming in contact 
with the opposite sex, they will learn to decide their 
marriage themselves; and choosing does not come at 
an early and immature age. Thus child widowhood, 
too, will be decreased. Then, too, the widows will be 
able to work for their livelihood if they don't wish to 
marry again." 

Purdah. To the North India girl, perhaps the 

most vexing social question is that of purdah. How 



68 Lighted to Lighten 

can education reach women who live shut away from 
the sky and the sun and the Uves of men? On the 
other hand, if after the seclusion of a thousand years 
freedom were suddenly thrust upon women not even 
trained to desire it, who can measure the disaster that 
would follow ? Where can the vicious circle be broken, 
and how ? 

Tiny arcs of its circumference have been broken al- 
ready. Lai Bagh includes in its family not only its 
majority of Christian girls, but also a scattering of 
Hindus and Muhammadans who have made more or 
less of a break with ancestral customs. 

One among these is a member of the Sophomore 
Class, Omiabala Chatterji of Allahabad. Of Brahman 
parentage, she was fortunate in having a father of 
liberal views, who was ambitious for his daughter's 
education. He died when Omiabala was but three 
years old, but not before he had passed on to his wife 
his hopes for the future of the little daughter. The 
mother, with no experience of school life herself, but 
only the limited opportunity of a little teaching in her 
own home, yet entered into the father's ambitions. 
From childhood Omiabala was taught that hers was 
not to be the ordinary life of the Brahman woman — 
she was set apart by her father's wish, dedicated to the 
service of her people. So the years came and went, 
and instead of wedding festivities the child was sent 
away on the journey to Lucknow, to enter into a 
strange, new life. There followed weeks of homesick- 
ness and longing, then gradual adjustment, then glad 




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LucKNOw 69 

acceptance of new opportunity. Omiabala now talks 
enthusiastically of her future plans for work among 
her own people — plans for the education of Brahman 
girls, and for marriage reform such as shall make this 
possible. 

The Freshman Class had a spirited discussion as to 
the benefits and evils of the purdah system. Opinions 
ranged all the way from that of the zealous young re- 
former who wished it abolished at once and for all; 
through advocates of slow changes lasting ten, twenty, 
or even thirty years; all the way to the young Hindu 
wife, who would never see it done away with, "because 
women would become disobedient to their husbands." 

Here are some of the pros and cons. A Hindu 
student writes : 

"I maintain that the purdah system should not be 
done away with altogether, for it will upset the whole 
foundation of the Hindu principle of 'dharm' or how a 
woman should act and behave before she is called a 
good and honorable woman. Sometimes, when a 
woman is given much freedom and liberty and is al- 
lowed to go wherever she pleases, she begins to take 
advantage of such opportunities and does those things 
which might bring disgrace to the family. The ques- 
tion of education should not be brought up in connec- 
tion with the purdah, for even the educated ladies are 
apt to fall in the same temptation as the uneducated 
ones when the purdah system is removed altogether. 
The purdah system has done much to maintain the hon- 
or and respect of the higher class ladies. The low 



70 Lighted to Lighten 

class women who are always abroad working among 
men and in the midst of throngs of people are not edu- 
cated at all and have as much freedom as their men 
have. So we can conclude that the purdah system only 
exists among higher classes of people and those who 
care much for the honor and respect of their family. 
The higher a family is the more it will be particular 
about this system." 

The following paragraph expresses the views of a 
Muhammadan Freshman : 

"Among us, that is the Muslims, purdah is very 
strict. Ladies need purdah at present, for the men 
are not civilized enough. Besides, the purdah system 
should be gradually abolished. If too much freedom is 
given all at once, ladies won't know how to behave and 
they will be an hindrance in further progress. Educa- 
tion is at the back of progress. Girls should first be 
educated and given liberty gradually. Though we 
Muslim girls have come to Christian colleges and don't 
observe purdah, yet we are very careful of how we 
should make the best of it and show a good example by 
our personality and behavior so that the people who 
criticize us may not have anything to say. I think if all 
of us try hard to abolish this system it will take us at 
least twenty years to do it. No matter what happens I 
don't approve of ladies mixing very much with gentle- 
men. 

"There are certainly many disadvantages in the pur- 
dah system. For instance, it makes ladies quite help- 
less and dependent. They cannot go out to get any 



LUCKNOW 71 

thing or travel even if they are in great necessity. They 
do not know the streets and roads, so they cannot run 
away to save their honor or life. Men seem to become 
their right hand and feet. They do not know, often, 
what is going on outside their homes and do not enjoy 
the beauty of nature, and live an uneventful life. This 
seems to make the ladies lazy and they always keep 
planning marriages. This is the chief reason of the 
early marriage of girls among the Muslims. The girl 
herself has nothing to do, so they think it best for her 
to get married." 

With these it is interesting to compare the views of 
a Christian student, a young pastor's wife, who along 
with the care of home and children is now receiving 
the higher education of which she was deprived in her 
schoolgirl days. 

"The genius of the East will take some time to be 
taught the social customs of the West, To an Indian 
it would be a horrible idea if his sister or daughter or 
wife will go out to tea or supper or dance with a young 
man who is neither related nor a close friend of the 
family. India will fondly preserve its genius. 

"Indian leaders look with alarm at the possibility of a 
female India of the type of the West. They would like 
the purdah system to be removed, females to be edu- 
cated, to get the franchise, and still for them to keep 
their modesty. There are many who would like to 
break this barrier, but it would be disastrous for India 
to arrive at such a state within fifteen or twenty years 
when ninety-nine out of one hundred women are illiter- 
ate. 



72 Lighted to Lighten 

"Education is essential and as long as Indian women, 
the future mothers of India, do not realize their re- 
sponsibility, it is much better and wiser that they should 
remain behind the scene. 

"The help we can give in bringing about this great re- 
form is to show by our example. Freedom does not 
mean simply coming out of purdah and taking undue 
advantage and misuse of liberty. We who have done 
away with our purdah should not be stumbling blocks 
to others. Freedom guided and governed by the Spirit 
of God is the only freedom and every true citizen ought 
to help to bring it about." 

Social Service. Lai Bagh students are interested not 
only in the theories of social reform ; they are taking a 
direct part in the application of these theories through 
the means of social service, not put off for some future 
"career," but carried on during the busy weeks of col- 
lege life. Nor is such service merely social ; through it 
all the Christian motive holds sway. We will let one 
of the students tell in her own words what they are 
attempting. 

" 'Cleanliness is next to godliness' is the first lesson 
we teach in our social and Christian service fields. 
Both in our work in the city and in our own servants' 
compound, we emphasize personal cleanliness and that 
of the home, and have regular inspection of servants' 
homes. 

"Religious instruction is given to non-Christian chil- 
dren and women in various sections of the city in 



LucKNow 73 

separate classes. Side by side with these, they are 
given tips about doctoring simple ailments, and taught 
how to take precautions at the time of epidemics like 
cholera, typhoid, etc. Lotions, fever mixtures, cough 
mixtures, quinine, etc., are given to the poorer de- 
pressed classes, as also clothes and soap to the needy 
ones. 

"In the servants' compound plots have been provided 
for gardening, and provision made for the children's 
play, and pictures given to parents as prizes for tidy 
homes. Soap and clothes and medicines are given here 
also; a special series of lectures on diseases and the 
evils of drink has been started. A lecture a week is 
given — cholera, malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery have 
been touched on — lantern slides and charts and pictures 
have been used for illustration. On Saturday nights 
the Christian servants have song-service and prayer 
meeting, and on Sunday noon a Bible class. Each of 
these is conducted by a teacher assisted by girls of the 
College. 

"There is opportunity for service for people of all 
tastes — those who prefer teaching how to read and 
write, for sewing, for care of the health, care of the 
baby, avoiding sickness, nursing the sick . . . but in 
every case devotion, enthusiasm, and a sympathetic 
Christian spirit are needed. Our motive both among 
our own Christian servants and those who reside in the 
city and are non-Christians is to serve the least of our 
needy fellowmen according to the wishes of our Mas- 
ter, and to enlighten and uplift our less fortunate 



74 Lighted to Lighten 

neighbors through the avenues of Christian social serv- 
ice. 

An interesting practical suggestion is the following : 

"In our Social Service class, which is held every 
Thursday, there has come up a suggestion about open- 
ing up a few Purdah Parks for Indian ladies. It is 
very essential that Indian women should have some 
places, where they can take recreation and have some 
social intercourse with one another, also that the rich 
and poor may all meet and be brought into sympathy 
with one another. 

"There is a Park right in front of our College, and 
we have suggested that, if this particular Park is made 
into a Purdah Park once a week, then we college girls 
interested in social service work can form a committee 
and look after the different arrangements, such as the 
water supply, games, playthings for children, etc. 

"We have drawn up a petition and this will be signed 
by the influential ladies of this place, such as the wives 
of the Professors of our Lucknow University, and 
then it will be presented to the Lucknow Improvement 
Trust Committee. 

"We all hope that this petition will be granted, and 
our sisters will have more of social life and hygienic 
advantages, to help make stronger mothers and 
stronger children." 

Nor do the girls of Isabella Thoburn College forget 
all these interests when vacation days come round. 
This tells something of holiday opportunity. How do 
our summer vacations compare with it ? 



LucKNow 75 

"How apt one is to slacken and get a little selfish in 
planning out a programme for a holiday. One is not 
tied down to the usual duties and routine of school 
work, and plans are made as to the best possible way 
of spending the days for one's own pleasure and re- 
laxation. The many little things that one's heart longs 
for, and for which there is no time during the busy 
days, are now looked forward to ; a particular piece of 
needlework, a favorite book, some excursions to 
places of interest ; all these and other things are likely 
to crowd out thoughts of our duties to others in making 
life a little better and some one a little happier each day. 

"And yet a holiday is the time when one can more 
freely give oneself to others, for opportunities of help- 
ful service offer themselves in the very holiday pur- 
suits, if one has eyes for them, 

"Rooming in a home where many mothers have still 
many more children, one would feel at first like escap- 
ing from the noise and commotion caused by crying 
babies, and yet here are some opportunities of service. 
It is never a wise plan to leave children to the entire 
care of ayahs. A very profitable hour may be spent in 
directing games when the little people build with their 
bricks gates and bridges, houses and castles, and the 
older ones listen with interest to some story of adven- 
ture. An hour spent in the open air under shady trees 
in this way would draw many a grateful heart, for 
there would be less crying, fewer quarrels, and a little 
more peace for all around. 

"In these days when strikes are so common, many 



76 Lighted to Lighten 

opportunities for social service offer themselves. It 
may be a postal strike. Now, not many of us like to 
be kept waiting for our mail, and, if the postmen are 
not bringing us our letters, we very soon contrive some 
means of getting them. I grant it isn't a very enviable 
job to be standing outside a delivery window awaiting 
the sorting of letters by a crew of girl guides and boy 
scouts, who are not any too serious about their work. 
But once the letters are secured and delivered at the 
neighboring homes of friends and others, it is some- 
thing done, besides the satisfaction of being able to 
sit down and read your own letters as well as having 
the grateful appreciation from others. 

"Again, a picnic has been planned to some far away 
hill. The party arrives; tiffin baskets are placed in 
some shady spot. One of the party wanders away to a 
little village not far off. She is soon surrounded by a 
group of scrubby children, who watch her with eyes 
full of curiosity and wonder. She dips her hand into 
the bag she has been carrying and brings out a handful 
of nuts and oranges, and, before sharing them with the 
children, she invites them to wash their scrubby, little 
hands and faces in the sparkling stream of clear, crys- 
tal water that is flowing through the valley. She gets 
to talking to them, and asks about their homes, and one 
little child leads her to a meagre, little, grassy hut in 
which her sick sister is lying. She hasn't any medicine 
with her, but she opens wide the door of the hut and 
lets the bright sunlight in. She strokes the little one's 
feverish brow, and sets to, and fixes up the bed and 



■ift^i '^iMJ 




LucKNow 77 

soon gets the sickroom, such as it is, clean and tidy. 
The mother is touched by the gentle kindliness of the 
stranger and confides her sorrows to her. Other homes 
are visited. People expecting the kind visitor brush up 
and tidy their huts. 

"So the picnic excursion ends leaving a cleaner and 
happier spot nestling in among those mountainsides. 
Several visits are paid to the little village. The stranger 
is no longer a stranger, for she is now known and loved 
and is greeted by clean, happy, smiling children, and 
blessed by grateful mothers. And so in the home and 
in the office and in God's out-of-doors we can find op- 
portunities for helping others," 

Eminent among the student body for maturity of 
thought and depth of Christian purpose is Shelomith 
Vincent. Many of these characteristics may be ac- 
counted for by her splendid inheritance. Her father 
was of the military caste, the son of a Zemindar, or 
petty rajah. At the time of the Mutiny he, a boy of 
ten years, ran away in the crowd and followed the 
mutineers on their long march from Lucknow to Agra, 
where he was rescued by a missionary and brought up 
in his family. Later, longing to know his past, the 
young man returned to Lucknow, found his relatives, 
weighed in the balance the claims of Hinduism and 
Christianity, and of his own accord decided for the 
latter. Later we see him a Sanskrit student in Benares, 
where he married his wife, a fifteen-year-old Brahman 
convert. 

The Christian couple moved soon to the Central 



78 Lighted to Lighten 

Provinces, where Mr. Vincent entered upon his twenty- 
five years of service as a Christian pastor, using his 
Sanskrit learning to interpret the message of Christian- 
ity to his Hindu friends. Yet it was in lowHer ways 
that his hfe was most telhng. SettHng in a peasant 
colony of a thousand so-called converts, only half- 
Christianized, the story of his labors and triumphs 
reads like that of Columba, or Boniface in early 
Europe. Through perils of robbers and perils of 
famine he labored on, building villages, digging wells, 
distributing American corn in famine days, reproving, 
teaching, guiding. All this I am telling, because it ex- 
plains much of the daughter's quiet strength. One of 
ten children, she has spent many years in earning 
money to educate the younger brothers and sisters, and 
she is finishing her college course as a mature woman. 
Miss Vincent hopes that the American fellowship may 
one day be hers ; and already her plans are developing 
as to the ways she will contrive to pass on her oppor- 
tunities to her fellow countrywomen. Her heart is 
with those illiterate village women among whom her 
childhood was passed; her longing is to share with 
them the truth, the beauty, and the goodness with 
which Lai Bagh has filled her days. 

Has Lai Bagh been a paying investment ? One wishes 
that every one whose dollars have found expression 
in its walls might come to feel the indefinaole spirit 
that pervades them, filling cold brick and mortar with 
life energy. For centuries philosophers searched for 
that Philosopher's Stone that was to transmute base 



LucKNow 79 

metals into gold. In the world to-day there are those 
who have found a subtler magic that transforms dead 
gold and silver into warm human purposes and the 
Christ-spirit of service. That is the miracle one 
sees in daily process at Lai Bagh. 



IN THE SECRET OF HIS PRESENCE 
Ellen Lakshmi Goreh (Lucknow College) 

In the secret of His presence how my soul delights to hide ! 
Oh, how precious are the lessons which I learn at Jesus' side ! 
Earthly cares can never vex me, neither trials lay me low; 
For when Satan comes to tempt me, to the secret place I go. 

When my soul is faint and thirsty, 'neath the shadow of His 

wing 
There is cool and pleasant shelter, and a fresh and crystal 

spring ; 
And my Saviour rests beside me, as we hold communion 

sweet : 
If I tried, I could not utter what He says when thus we meet. 

Only this I know: I tell Him all my doubts, my griefs and 

fears ; 
Oh, how patiently He listens ! and my drooping soul He 

cheers : 
Do you think He ne'er reproves me? What a false friend He 

would be. 
If He never, never told me of the sins which He must see. 

Would you like to know the sweetness of the secret of the 

Lord? 
Go and hide beneath His shadow: this shall then be your 

reward ; 
And whene'er you leave the silence of that happy meeting 

place. 
You must mind and bear the image of the Master in your face. 



80 



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SHELOMITH VINCENT 



LAL BAGH ALUMNAE RECORDS SHOW THE FOLLOWING: 

The first Kindergarten in India. 

The first college in India with full staff of women and residencs 
accommodation. 

The first Arya Samaj B. A. graduate. 

The F. Sc. graduate who became the second woman with the B. Sc. 
degree in India. 

The F. Sc. graduate who later graduated at the foremost Medical 
College in North India as the first Muhammadaa woman doctor in 
India and probably in the world. 

The first woman B. A. and the first Normal School graduate from 
Rajputana. 

The first woman to receive her M. A. in North India, 

The first Muhammadan woman to take her F. A. examination from 
the Central Provinces. 

Probably the first F. A. student to take her examination in purdah. 

The first Teachers Conference (held annually) in India. 

The first woman's college to offer the F. Sc. course. 

The first college to have on its staff an Indian lady. 

The first woman (Lilavati Singh) from the Orient to serve on a 
world's Committee. 

The first woman dentist. 

The first woman agriculturist. 

The first woman in India to be in charge of a Boys' High School. 

A Lai Bagh graduate organized the Home Missionary Society which 
has developed into an agency of great service to the neglected Anglo- 
Indian community scattered throughout India. 

The Lai Bagh student who took an agricultural course in America 
and is now helping convert wastes of the Himalaya regions into 
fruitful valleys. 

Miss Phoebe Rowe, an Anglo-Indian who waa associated with Lai 
Bagh in Miss Thoburn's time, was a wonderful influence in the vil- 
lages of North India and carried the Christian message by her beauti- 
ful voice as well as her consecrated personality. She traveled in 
America, endearing India to many friends here. She is one — perhaps 
the most remarkable, however — of many Lai Bagh daughters who are 
serving as evangelists in faraway places. 



81 



FROM A STUDENT AT MADRAS WOMEN'S COLLEGE 

"Your letter was handed to me as I returned from my 
evening hour of prayer, prayer for our school, special prayer 
for the problem God has called us to tackle together. I 
believe that the solution for many of our problems at school 
is to put things on a Christian foundation. We want workers 
who are real Christians and who love the Master as sin- 
cerely as they do themselves and serve Him for their love of 
Him. This may not be easy work for us to do, but if God 
is transforming the whole globe and moulding it from the 
"new spiritual center," namely, — ^Jesus Christ, it is certainly 
not hard for Him to accomplish it in this place. How He 
is going to do it I am blind to see. Let us put our feet on 
the one step that we see with the faith expressed in "One 
step enough for me," and the next step will flash before, our 
eyes. One question that used to trouble me is, how we are 
to do the work. The poem by Edward Sill in 'The Manhood 
of the Master ' cheers me up now as then with the thought 
that a broken sword flung away by a craven as useless was 
used by a king's son to win victory in the same battle. God 
will use it and perform His work. We have dedicated our- 
selves for His duty which is gripping our souls. He will 
use them according to His purpose." 



82 



CHAPTER FOUR 

An International Alliance 

Education and While statesmen discuss disarmament 
World Peace. and politicians and newspaper editors 
foment race consciousness and mutual distrust, certain 
forces that never figure in newspaper headlines, that 
come "not with observation," are working with silent 
constructive power to bind nations together in ties of 
peace and good will. Among these silent forces are 
certain educational institutions. Columbia University 
has its Cosmopolitan Club, at whose Sunday night sup- 
pers you may meet representatives of forty to fifty 
nations, Occidental and Oriental. In the Near East, 
amid the race hatred and strife that set every man's 
hand against his fellow, the American Colleges at Con- 
stantinople and Beirut have stood foremost among the 
forces that produce unification and brotherhood. 

During the war-scarred days of 1915, while nation 
was rising up against nation, there was founded in the 
city of Madras one of these international ventures in 
co-operation. Known to the world of India as the 
Women's Christian College of Madras, it might just as 
truthfully be called a Triangular Alliance in Education, 
for in it Great Britain including Canada, the United 
States, and India are joined together in educational 
endeavor. America may well admire what Britain has 
been doing during long years for India's educational 

83 



84 Lighted to Lighten 

advancement. Among England's more recent contri- 
butions to education in India none has been greater 
that the coming of Miss Eleanor McDougall from Lon- 
don University to take the principalship of this inter- 
national college for women. Under her wise leader- 
ship British and American women have worked in one 
harmonious unit, and international co-operation has 
been transformed from theory to fact. 

Where Missions The Women's Christian College is 
Co-operate. not only international, it is also inter- 

missionary. Supported by fourteen different Mission 
Boards, including almost every shade of Protestant 
belief and every form of church government, it stands 
not only for international friendship, but also as an 
outstanding evidence of Christian unity. 

The staff and the student body are as varied as the 
supporting constituency. In the former, along with 
British and American professors are now two Indian 
women lecturers, Miss George, a Syrian Christian, who 
teaches history, and Miss Janaki, a Hindu, who teaches 
botany. Both are resident and a happy factor in the 
home life of the college. Among the students nine In- 
dian languages are represented, ranging all the way 
from Burma to Ceylon, from Bengal to the Malabar 
Coast. From the last named locality come Syrian 
Christians in great numbers. This interesting sect 
loves to trace its history back to the days of the Apostle 
Thomas. Be that historical fact or merely a pious tra- 
dition, this sect can undoubtedly boast an indigenous 




A Road Near the College 




/.,,&::,. ., ,:, 



The Potters' Shop 
STREET SCENES IN MADRAS 



An International Alliance 85 

form of Christianity that dates back to the early cen- 
turies of the Christian era; and it stands to-day in a 
place of honor in the Indian Christian community. 

The Sunflower Perhaps much of the success which 
and the Lamp. the College at Madras has achieved 
on the side of unity is due to the fact that her members 
are too busy to think or talk about it because their 
time is all filled up with actually doing things together. 
Expressing this spirit of active co-operation is the 
college motto, "Lighted to lighten" ; the emblem in the 
shield is a tiny lamp such as may burn in the poorest 
homes in India. Below the lamp is a sunflower, whose 
meaning has been discussed in the college magazine by 
a new student. She says, "To-day the sunflower stands 
for very much in my mind. It is symbolic of this our 
College, for, as our amateur botanists tell us, the sun- 
flower is not a flower, but a congregation of them. The 
tiny buds in the centre are our budding intellects. To- 
day they are in the making ; to-morrow they will bloom 
like their sisters who surround them. Nourished from 
the same source, their fruit will be even likewise. 

"Around these are the golden rays — each a tongue of 
fire to protect and inspire. There is none high or low 
amongst them, being all alike, and these are our tutors, 
and the sunflower itself turns to the sun, the great 
giver of life, for its inspiration, ever turning to him, 
never losing sight of his face. A force inexplicable 
draws the flower to the King of Day, even as our hearts 
are turned to Him at morn and at eve, be we East or 
West." 



86 Lighted to Lighten 

In a Garden. It is fitting that the sunflower should 
bloom in a garden, and so it does. This time it is not 
a walled garden like that of Lai Bagh ; the Women's 
College is situated out from the city in a green and 
spacious suburb, where the little River Cooum wanders 
by its open spaces. The ten acres have much the air of 
an American college campus, — the same sense of 
academic quiet, of detachment from the work-a-day 
world. The whole compound is dominated by the tall, 
white columns of the old main building, which confer 
an air of distinction upon the whole place, as well they 
may, for have they not guarded successively govern- 
ment officials and Indian rajahs? 

Nearby is the new residence hall, as modern as the 
other is historic. Three stories in height, its verandahs 
are in the form of a hollow square, and look out upon a 
courtyard gay with the bright-hued foliage of crotons 
and other tropical plants. Beyond is the garden itself, 
filled not with the roses and chrysanthemums of winter 
Lucknow, but with the perpetual summer foliage of 
spreading rain trees, palms, and long fronded ferns, 
with fluffy maidenhair between. In their season the 
purple masses of Bougainvillea, and the crimson of the 
Flamboya tree set the garden afire. In the evening 
when the girls are sitting under the trees or walking 
down the long vistas with the level sunbeams bringing 
out the bright colors of their draped saris, it brings to 
mind nothing so much as a scene from "The Princess" 
where among fair English gardens 

"One walked reciting by herself, and one 
In this hand held a volume as to read." 



An International Alliance 87 

Student Yet life in the Women's College is not 

Organizations. a cloistered retreat such as "The 
Princess" tried to establish, nor are its activities con- 
fined to the study of classics in a garden. Student or- 
ganizations flourish here with a variety almost as great 
as in the West. There is, first of all, the College Com- 
mittee, which corresponds roughly to our Scheme of 
Student Government. Its members are chosen from the 
classes and in their turn elect a President known as 
"Senior Student." She is the official representative of 
the whole student body. Communications from faculty 
to students pass through her, and she represents the 
College on state occasions, such as visits from the Vice- 
roy or other Government officials. Various student 
committees are also elected to plan meetings for the 
Literary and Debating Societies, to organize excursions 
for "Seeing Madras," and to plan for athletic teams 
and contests. How well the last named have succeeded 
is proved by the silver cup carried off as a trophy by 
the College badminton team, which distinguished itself 
as the winner in last year's intercollegiate sports. 

An unusual organization is the Star Club, which 
has been carried on for several years, with programme 
meetings once a month and bi-weekly groups for ob- 
servation. No wonder that astrology and the begin- 
nings of astronomy came from the Orient, or that 
Wise Men from the East found a Star as the sign to 
lead their journeying. Night after night the constel- 
lations rise undimmed in the clear sky and fairly urge 
the beholder to close acquaintance. A knowledge of 



88 Lighted to Lighten 

them fills the sky with friendly forms and gives the 
student a new and lasting "hobby" that may be pur- 
sued anywhere, and kept through life. The Star Club 
has popularized its celestial interests by presenting to 
the College a pageant in three scenes, a "Dream of the 
Sun and Planets," in which the Earth Dweller is trans- 
ported to the regions of the sky and holds long and 
intimate conversations with the various heavenly 
bodies. As the final scene, the planets slant in their 
relative positions, and the Signs of the Zodiac with 
shields take their places on each side of Father Sun. 

The Natural History Club has interests ranging all 
the way from the theory of evolution to the names and 
songs of the common birds of Madras. 

The Art Club not only does out-door sketching, but 
has entered upon a wide field in the study of Indian 
art and architecture. India is reviving a partly forgot- 
ten interest in her ancient arts and crafts and has 
much to offer the student, from the wonderful lines 
of the Taj Mahal to the Ahmadabad stone windows 
with their lace-like traceries; from the portraits of 
Moghal Emperors to the fine detail of South India 
temple carvings. Study in the Art Club means a new 
appreciation of the beauty found among one's own 
people. 

The Dramatic and Musical Societies unite now end 
then in public entertainments, such as "Comus" which 
was given in honor of the women graduates of the 
whole Presidency at the time of the University Convo- 
cation. The Society repertoire of plays given during 



An International Alliance 89 

the last five years includes a considerable variety — 
dramatists so far apart as Shakespeare and Tagore; 
the old English moralities of "Everyman" and "Eager 
Heart"; the old Indian epic-dramas of "Sakuntala" 
and "Savitri"; together with Sheridan's "Rivals" and 
scenes from "Emma" and "Ivanhoe." The Musical 
Club specializes on Christmas carols, with which the 
College is wakened at four o'clock "on Christmas day 
in the morning." 

The History Club sounds like an organization of 
research workers; on the contrary, its interests are 
bound up with the march of current events in India 
and the world. At the time when India was stirred by 
the visit of the Duke of Connaught and the launching 
of the Reform Government, this Club took to itself the 
rights of suffrage, elected its members to the first 
Madras Legislative Council, and after the elections 
were duly confirmed sat in solemn assembly to settle 
the affairs of the Province. They have also carried 
out equally dramatic representations of the English 
House of Lords and even the League of Nations. 

"Lighted to The Young Women's Christian Asso- 

Lighten." ciation of the College among its many 

activities includes Bible classes in the vernacular which 
bring together students from the same language areas 
and after a week of purely English study and English 
chapel service serve as a link with home life and home 
conditions. Not only with home on the one side; on 
the other the Association ties them up with wider in- 



90 Lighted to Lighten 

terests, with conferences that bring together students 
from all India, with activities that range all the way 
from teaching servants' children to read and translat- 
ing Christian books into their own vernaculars to send- 
ing gifts of money to a suffering student in Vienna. 

Social service is carried on along lines not very dif- 
ferent from those pursued in Lucknow. Sunday 
schools, visits to outcaste villages, and lectures on 
health and cleanliness have their place. A new feature 
is the dispensing of simple medical help, which not 
only relieves the recipients, but teaches the students 
what they can do later when in their own homes. An- 
other distinctive venture is the "Little School" in the 
college grounds, where volunteer workers take turns 
morning and evening in teaching the neighborhood chil- 
dren, and thus get their first taste of the joys and diffi- 
culties of the teacher's profession. 

An interested girl thus expresses her ideas on the 
subject of social service. Her emphasis upon the posi- 
tive side of life speaks well for her future accomplish- 
ment : 

"Though the condition of the people is deplorable we 
need not despair of making matters better for them. 
Instead of giving the mere negative instructions that 
they should not drink, or be extravagant with their 
money, or get into the clutches of money lenders, we 
can do something positive. Some interesting diver- 
sions could be invented that would prevent men from 
frequenting drinking houses. With regard to their ex- 
travagance on certain occasions, we might suggest to 



An International Alliance 91 

them ways in which they could lessen items of expendi- 
ture. To prevent their being at the mercy of money 
lenders, co-operative societies m.ay be started in order 
to lend money at a lower rate of interest ; or to supply 
them with capital or with tools in order to start their 
work. 

"To remove the other evil of ignorance with regard 
to health, we may go into the villages and give them 
practical lessons on cleanliness. We could tell them of 
the value of fresh air and give them other needful in- 
structions. 

"In doing social work of this kind, there are many 
principles we ought to have in mind. Instead of telling 
a poor man with no means of living that he should not 
steal it would be better to see that he is somehow placed 
beyond the reach of want. Another is that instead of 
merely imparting morality in negative form, it would be 
better to point out to them some positive way in which 
they could improve. More important than any of these 
principles is that instead of thinking of 'bestowing 
good' on the people, it would be more effective, if we 
co-operate with them and enlist their initiative, thus en- 
abling them by degrees to be fit to manage their own 
affairs." 

Applied Certain parts of the curriculum also 

Sociology. tie up closely with community life. 

Economics and essay writing lead into fields of re- 
search. Essays and contributions to the College mag- 
azine, "The Sunflower," bear such titles as the "Social 



92 Lighted to Lighten 

Needs of Kottayam District," which goes into the 
causes of poverty and distress in the writer's own lo- 
caHty, or "The Rehgion of the People of Kandy," 
written by a convert from Buddhism who knows from 
her own childhood experience the beauties and defects 
of that great religious system. 

An intercollegiate essay prize was won by a Chris- 
tian college girl who wrote on her own home town, 
"The Superstitions and Customs of the Village of 
Namakal." She writes : 

"A set of villages would also be seen where the 
people are very much like the insects under a buried 
stone, which run underground, unable to see the light 
or to adapt themselves to the light. The moment the 
stone is turned up, so much accustomed are they to live 
in the darkness of superstition and unbelief that they 
think they would be better off to go on so, and refuse to 
accept the light rays of science, education, and civili- 
zation, which are willingly given them." 

The list of current omens and superstitions which 
she has unearthed may prove of interest to Western 
readers who have httle idea of the burden of taboo 
under which the average Hindu passes his days. The 
essayist says : 

"An attempt to enumerate these superstitious beliefs 
would be useless, but the following would illustrate the 
villagers' deep regard for them. It is a good omen to 
hear a bell ring, an ass bray, or a Brahmini kite cry, 
when starting out to see a married woman whose hus- 
band is alive. They believe it to be an excellent omen 




In the Cloister's Studious Shade 




Miss Jackson and Some Social Service Workers 
SCENES AT MADRAS COLLEGE 



An International Alliance 93 

to see a corpse, a bunch of flowers, water, milk, a 
toddy pot, or a washerman with dirty clothes, while 
setting out to give any present to her or her husband. 
No Hindu man or woman would set out to visit a newly 
married couple if he or she hears sneezing while start- 
ing, or proceed on the journey if he or she hears the 
wailing of a beggar, or happens to see a Brahmin 
widow, a snake, a full oil pot, or a cat." 

The College Many of the students are full of ideas 

Woman and as to the various places which women 

India. may fill in the economy of the India 

of the future. Among the professions open to women, 
teaching is of course the favorite. Its opportunities 
are shown in the following : 

"The University women who, more than any one 
else, have enjoyed the fruits of education and the 
privileges of college hfe are naturally very keen on 
imparting them to the million of their less graduate 
sisters. Almost every student in a college is now filled 
with a greater love and longing to help the uneducated 
women. Thus, most of them go out as teachers. Some 
of them work in their own schools, or take up work 
either in a mission school or a government school. 
Some of the graduates are now in a position to estab- 
lish schools of their own. The pay for teachers is 
usually lower than that earned by women in other 
positions, but the fact that so many women become 
teachers shows that they care more for service than 
for salary, for surely this is the greatest service that 
they as women can give to India." 



94 Lighted to Lighten 

Another student has some ideas as to new methods 
to be used: 

"The present method of teaching in India is not quite 
suitable to the modern stage of children. Now, children 
are very inquisitive and try to learn by themselves. 
They cannot understand anything which is taught as 
mere doctrines. The teacher has to draw her answers 
from the children and thus build up her teaching on 
the base of their previous knowledge. So the educated 
women have to train themselves in schools where they 
are made fit to meet the present standard of children." 

Miss Cornelia Sorabji has shown by her career what 
a woman lawyer can do for other women. A college 
girl writes as follows of the opportunities for service 
that other students might find in the law : 

"I have seen many women in the villages, though 
not educated, showing the capacities of a good lawyer. 
I think that women have a special talent in performing 
this business, and hence would do much better than 
men. Tenderness and mercy are qualities greatly re- 
quired in a judge or magistrate. Women are famous 
for these and so their judgments which will be the 
products of justice tempered by mercy will be com- 
mendable. A man cannot understand so fully a 
woman, the workings of her mind, her thoughts and 
her views, as a woman can ; so in order to plead the 
cause of women there should be women lawyers who 
could understand and put their cases in a very clear 
light." 

Another feels the need of women in politics : 



An International Alliance 95 

■'According to the present system in India, the gov- 
ernment is carried on by men alone. Thus women are 
exclusively shut off from the administration of the 
country. The good and bad results of the government 
affect men and women alike. Therefore, it is only fair 
that women also should have an active part in the gov- 
ernment of the country. Women should be given seats 
in the Legislative Council where they would have an 
opportunity to listen to the problems of the country 
and try to solve them. 

"From ordinary life we see that women are more 
economical than men. Therefore, it would be better 
for the country if women could take a part in economic 
matters. When the rate of tax is fixed men are likely 
to decide it merely from a consideration of their income 
without thinking about small expenses. Women are 
acquainted with every expense in detail. If women 
could take part in economic affairs, the expenditure of 
a country would be directed in a better and more care- 
ful way. 

"In national and international questions also women 
can take a part. Women are more conservative, sym- 
pathetic, and kind than men. Great changes and 
misery which are not foreseen at all are brought by 
wars between different countries. Women, too, can 
consider about the affairs of wars as well as men. 
Their sympathetic and conservative views will help the 
people not to plunge into needless wars and political 
complications. 

"Women know as well as, and perhaps more than 



96 Lighted to Lighten 

men, the evils which result from the illiteracy of people 
and their unsanitary conditions. Men spend much of 
their time outside home, while women in their quiet 
homes can see their surroundings and watch the needs 
of people around them. So women can give good ideas 
in matters concerning education and sanitation. In 
this way, women can influence the public opinion of a 
place and the government of a country depends much 
on the nature of public opinion." 

But with all these "new woman theories" the claims 
of home are not forgotten : 

"Among the many possibilities opening out to 
women, we cannot fail to mention home life, though it 
is nothing new. 

"According to the testimony of all history, the worth 
and blessing of men and nations depend in large meas- 
ure on the character and ordering of family life. 'The 
family is the structural cell of the social organism. In 
it lives the power of propagation and renewal of life. 
It is the foundation of morality, the chief educational 
institution, and the source of nearly all real content- 
ment among men.' All other questions sink into insig- 
nificance when the stability of the family is at stake. 
In short, the family circle is a world in miniature, with 
its own habits, its own interests, and its own ties, 
largely independent of the great world that lies outside. 
When the family is of such great importance, how 
much greater should be the responsibilities of women in 
the ordering of that Hf e ? Is it not there in the home 
that we develop most of our habits, our- lines of thought 
and action? 




In the Laboratory, Madras 




Tennis Champions with Cup 
AT WORK AND PLAY 



An International Alliance 97 

"Even while keeping home, woman can do other 
kinds of work. She can help her husband in his varied 
activities by showing interest and sympathy in all that 
he does; she can influence him in every possible way. 
Then also she may do social and religious work, and 
even teaching, though she has to manage a home. But 
the work that needs her keenest attention is in the home 
itself, in training up the children. Happiness and 
cheerfulness in the home circle depend more or less on 
the radiant face of the mother, as she performs her 
simple tasks, upon her tenderness, on her unwearied 
willingness to surpass all boundaries in love. She is the 
'centre' of the family. The physical and moral train- 
ing of her children falls to her lot, 

"Now, the developing of character is no light task, 
nor is it the least work that has to be done. The family 
exists to train individuals for membership in a large 
group. In the little family circle attention can be con- 
centrated on a few who in turn can go out and influence 
others. The family, therefore, is the nursery of all 
human virtues and powers. 

"In conclusion, expressing the same idea in stronger 
words, it is to be noted that whether India shall main- 
tain her self-government, when she receives it, depends 
on how far the women are ready to fulfil the obliga- 
tions laid upon them. This is a great question and has 
to be decided by the educated women of India." 

One Reformer ^^ ^^^ wealth of human interest that 
and What She lies hidden in the life-stories of the 
Achieved. one hundred and ten students who 



98 Lighted to Lighten 

make up the College, who has the insight to speak? 
Coming from homes Hindu or Christian, conservative 
or liberal, from the cosmopoHtan atmosphere of the 
modern Indian city, or the far side of the jungle vil- 
lages, one might find in their home histories, in their 
thoughts and ambitions and desires, a composite pic- 
ture of the South Indian young womanhood of to-day. 
Countries as well as individuals pass through periods 
of adolescence, of stress and strain and the pains of 
growth, when the old is merging in the new. The stu- 
dent generation of India is passing through that phase 
to-day, and no one who fails to grasp that fact can hope 
to understand the psychology of the present day stu- 
dent. 

In Pushpam's story it is possible to see something 
of that clash of old and new, of that standing "be- 
tween two worlds" that makes India's life to-day ad- 
venturous — too adventurous at times for the comfort 
of the young discoverer. 

Pushpam's home was in the jungle — by which is 
meant not the luxuriant forests of your imagination, 
but the primitive country unbroken by the long ribbon 
of the railway, where traffic proceeds at the rate of the 
lumbering, bamboo-roofed bullock cart, and the un- 
seemliness of Western haste is yet unknown. Twice a 
week the postbag comes in on the shoulders of the lop- 
ing tappal runner. Otherwise news travels only 
through the wireless telegraphy of bazaar gossip. The 
village struggles out toward the irrigation tank and the 
white road, banyan-shaded, whose dusty length ties its 



An International Alliance 99 

life loosely to that of the town thirty miles off to the 
eastward. On the other side are palmyra-covered up- 
lands, and then the Hills. 

The Good News sometimes runs faster than railway 
and telegraph. Here it is so, for the village has been 
solidly Christian for fifty years. Its people are not out- 
castes, but substantial landowners, conservative in their 
indigenous ways, yet sending out their sons and daugh- 
ters to school and college and professional life. 

Of that village Pushpam's father is the teacher- 
catechist, a gentle, white-haired man, who long ago 
set up his rule of benevolent autocracy, "for the good 
of the governed." 

"To this child God has given sense ; he shall go to the 
high school in the town." The catechist speaks with 
the conviction of a Scotch Dominie who has discovered 
a child "of parts," and resistance on the part of the 
parent is vain. The Dominie's own twelve are all 
children "of parts" and all have left the thatched 
schoolhouse for the education of the city. 

Pushpam is the youngest. Term after term finds her 
leaving the village, jogging the thirty miles of dust- 
v^'hite road to the town, spending the night in the 
crowded discomfort of the third class compartment 
marked for "Indian females." Vacation after vacation 
finds her reversing the order of journeying, plunging 
from the twentieth century life of college into the vil- 
lage's mediaeval calm. There is no lack of occupation 
— letters to write for the unlearned of the older gener- 
ation to their children far afield, clerks and writers 



100 Lighted to Lighten 

and pastors in distant parts; there are children to 
coach for coming examinations; there are sore eyes 
to treat, and fevers to reduce. 

One Christmas Pushpam returns as usual, yet not as 
usual, for her capable presence has lost its customary 
calm. She is "anxious and troubled about many 
things," or is it about one ? 

Social unrest has dominated college thinking this 
last term, focussing its avenging eyes upon that Dowry 
System which works debt and eventual ruin in many 
a South Indian home. Pushpam has seen the family 
struggles that have accompanied the marriages of her 
older sisters ; the "cares of the world" that have pressed 
until all the joy of days that should have been festal 
was lost in the counting out of rupees. In neighbor 
homes she has seen rejoicing at the birth of a son, as 
the bringer of prosperity, and grief, hardly concealed, 
at the adversity of a daughter's advent. Unchristian ? 
Yes ; but not for the lack of the milk of human kind- 
ness ; rather from the incubus of an evil social system, 
inherited from Hindu ancestors. 

Pushpam's father is growing old; lands and jewels 
have shrunk. Married sons and daughters are already 
gathering and saving for the future of their own young 
daughters. Three thousand rupees are demanded of 
Pushpam in the marriage market. The thought of it 
is marring the peace of her father's face and breaking 
his sleep of nights. But Pushpam has news to impart, 
"Father, I have something to say. It will hurt you, but 
I must speak. It is the firsftime that I, your daughter, 



An International Alliance 101 

have even disobeyed your wishes, but this time it must 
be. 

"All this college term we girls have been thinking 
and talking of our marriage system and its evils. Hus- 
bands are bought in the market, and in these war years 
they, like everything else, are high. A man thinks not 
of the girl who will make his home, but of the rupees 
she will bring to his father's coffers. Marriage means 
not love, but money. My classmates and I have talked 
and written and thought. Now three of us have made 
one another a solemn promise. Our parents shall give 
no dowries for us. We have no fear of remaining un- 
married ; we can earn our way as we go and find our 
happiness in work. Or if there are men who care for 
us, and not for the rupees we bring, let them ask for 
us ; we will consider such marriages, but no other. Do 
not protest. Father, for our minds are made up." 

The old man, for years autocrat of the village, bows 
to the will of his youngest child, fearing the jeers of 
relatives, yet unable to withstand. 

No, Pushpam did not remain single. In men's col- 
leges the same ferment is going on, and when a suitor 
came he said, "I want you for yourself, not for the gold 
that you might bring." He married Pushpam, and 
their joy of Christian service is not shadowed by the 
financial distress brought upon the father's house. 

Mary Smith asked to be shown the justification of 
college education for Indian girls. Is it good? The 
College of the Sunflower has its home in dignified and 
seemly buildings set in a tropical garden. Does its 



103 Lighted to Lighten 

beauty draw students away from the world of active 
life, or send them with fresh strength to share its 
struggles. Pushpam has given one answer. Another 
one may find in the college report of 1931 with its 
register of graduates. Name after name rolls out its 
story of busy lives — married women, who are house- 
makers and also servants of the public weal; govern- 
ment inspectresses of schools, who tour around "the 
district," bringing new ideas and encouragement to 
isolated schools; teachers and teachers, and yet more 
teachers, in government and mission schools, and 
schools under private management. Only six years of 
existence, and yet the Sunflower has opened so wide, 
the Lamp has lighted so many candles in dim corners. 
Will the Mary Smiths of America do their part that 
the next six years may be bigger and better than the 
last? 



The spirit of Madras Students is shown in the following ex- 
tracts from personal letters written to former teachers : 

FROM A GRADUATE OF MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

"Last week we had the special privilege of hearing Mr. and Mrs. 
Annett, of India Sunday School Union. The last day Mr. Annett 
showed how we can lead our children to Christ and make them accept 
Christ as their Master. That is the aim of religious education. My 
heart thrilled within me when I heard Mr. Annett in his last lecture 
confirm what I had thought out as principles in teaching and training 
the young, and I found my eyes wet. But the very faith which 
Jesus had in people and which triumphs over all impossibilities I am 
trying to have. I have patiently turned to the girls and am trying to 
help them in their lives. The Christ power in me is revealing to me 
many things since I surrendered to Him my will. He is showing me 
what mighty works one can do through intercessory prayer which I 
try to do with many failings. 

"Politics have lately been very interesting to me. Rather I havs 
been forced to enter in. You will have read or heard of the new 
movement in India that sprang up early in September. Gandhi is the 
leader. I have some clippings to send you. It is not about that I wish 
to write, but about the remarkable way India is repressing the move- 
ment. The Panjah, the province for which sympathy is called for and 
the one which affords the cause for non-co-operation, has thrown up 
Gandhi's scheme and her sons are standing for council elections. No 
Indian can help being thrilled over the nominations and elections for 
legislative councils and councils of state, which are to assemble in 
January according to the Reform Act. Our girls are taking a keen 
interest in the affairs of the country and earnestly praying for her. 

"This is the week of prayer of the Y. W. and Y. M. C. A. I am sure 
you are remembering us, — the young women of India and our girls 
who are to lay out the future in India; also our young men and boys, 

"The Student Federation has its conference in P during Christ- 
mas, and four of our college students are going. If only the men would 
be open hearted and less prejudiced and brave enough to stand alone 
and reform society. I think the time is coming. 

"Isn't it strange that you should also feel the thirst for Bible study 
just as I am doing here. I never felt the lack of Scriptural knowl- 
edge as now while I teach our girls." 



103 



EXTRACTS FROM A TEACHER'S JOURNAL IN 
MADRAS COLLEGE 

November 12, 1921. 

We had nine graduates to garland last night and should 
have had more if Convocation had followed closely on their 
success in April. But now one is at Somerville College, 
Oxford (we have five old students in England now and one 
in America), one at her husband's home in Bengal, one 
serving in Pundita Ramabai's Widows' Home at Mukti near 
Poona, and three kept away by some duty in their families. 
Among our nine were two who had been among our very 
earliest students ; in fact, _ one bears the very first name en- 
tered on our student roll in April, 1915, when we were look- 
ing round in trembling hope to see v/hether any students at 
all would entrust themselves to our inexperienced hands. 
These two, of course, left some years ago, but have since 
taken the teachers' degree, the Licentiate in Teaching, for 
which they have prepared themselves by private study while 
serving in schools. 

This L.T. is a University degree open to graduates in 
Arts only, and a B.A., L.T., is regarded as a teacher fully 
equipped for the highest posts in schools. The preparation 
for it has been carried on hitherto chiefly at a Government 
Teachers' College, where the few women students, though 
very courteously treated, have naturally been at a great dis- 
advantage among more than a hundred men. Such of our 
graduates as have spent the required year there have been 
considerably disappointed, feeling that their work has been 
too easy and too theoretical. In any case it is impossible 
that much practical work could be found for so large a 
number of students, and the belief is growing that the ideal 
training college is a small one. That it must be a Chris- 
tian one is from our point of view still more important. 
The women B.A., L.T.'s will hold positions of greater in- 
fluence than any other class in South India. They will be 
Government Inspectresses, Heads of Middle Schools and 
High Schools, lecturers in Training Colleges, in fact, the 
sources of the inspiration which will permeate every region 
of women's education. Before long the missions will be 
unable to keep pace with the rapid increase of available 
pupils for girls' schools. Their success in originating and 
fostering the idea of educating girls has now produced a 

104 



Madras College 105 

situation with which we cannot personally cope, but which 
we can indirectly control by concentrating effort at the most 
vital spot, that is the training of the highest rank of women 
teachers. These will set the tone and, to a great extent, 
determine the quality of the women teachers who have 
lower qualifications, and these will have in their hands the 
training of ever-increasing numbers of girl pupils and will 
hand on the ideals which they have themselves received. 

It was an honor which we felt very deeply when the 
Missionary Educational Council of South India entrusted to 
the council of our College the task of inaugurating an L.T. 
College for Women, and we have been very busy about it. 

December 15, 1921. 

More than a month has passed since I began the Journal 
and I am now sitting in the junior B.A. class-room watching 
over nineteen students (the twentieth happens to be absent) 
who are writing their terminal examination papers. I was 
a false weather-prophet; rain did not come, and still keeps 
away. Instead there is a high cool wind, and every one of 
these students is firmly holding down her paper with the 
left hand while her fountain pen (they all have fountain 
pens) skims all too rapidly over the page. The great prin- 
ciple of answering an examination paper is never to waste 
a moment on thought. If you do not know what to say next, 
repeat what you said before until a new idea strikes you. 
As it is not necessary to dip the pen in ink it should never 
leave the page. This method enables them to produce small 
pamphlets which they hand in with a happy sense of achieve- 
ment, but the examiner's heart sinks as she gathers up the 
volumes of hasty manuscript. 

Sometimes, however, the answers err on the side of con- 
ciseness. "We believe them because we cannot prove them," 
was the truthful reply of a student in Physics to the ques- 
tion, "Why do we believe Newton's Laws of Motion?" Or 
sometimes an essential transition is omitted ; "At the period 
of the Roman conquest the Greeks were politically hopeless, 
economically bankrupt, and morally corrupt. They became 
teachers." But sometimes it is the caprice of the English 
language which betrays them. "The events of the 15th 
century which most affected philosophic thought were the 
founding of America and the founding of the Universe." 
Occasionally they administer an unconscious rebuke. I was 
just starting out to give an address at a week-night evening 
service from the chancel steps of a neighboring church, and 



106 Lighted to Lighten 

having a minute or two to spare I took up one of my 120 
Scripture papers and read, "St. Paul's chief difficulty with 
the Corinthians was that women insisted on speaking in 
church. It is wicked for women to talk in church." 

The nineteen students before me are very representative 
of our student body, which now numbers one hundred and 
thirty. Eleven are writing on Constitutional History, two 
on Philosophy, four on Zoology and two (a young Hindu 
married girl and a Syrian Christian) on Malayalam literature. 
Ten of them speak Tamil, eight Malayalam, and one Telugu, 
They vary in rank from high official circles to very low 
origins, but most belong to what we should call the profes- 
sional classes. All are barefooted and wear the Indian dress, 
which in the case of the Syrians is always white. 

Through the open door I look into the library where the 
fifty-three new students of this year are writing an English 
paper. There are eight Hindus and one European among 
them, also two students from Ceylon, two from Hyderabad, 
and one, differing widely from the rest in dress and facial 
type, from Burma. The lecturer in charge is Miss Chamber- 
lain, the daughter of our invaluable secretary in America. 
She arrived only three weeks ago to take the place of Miss 
Sarber who has started on her furlough and already the dig- 
nity of the philosopher and psychologist is mingling with the 
gaiety which makes her table a favorite place for students. 

The debate on the conscience clause* which took place in 
the new Legislative Assembly in November shows that the 
party now in power, the non-Brahmin middle-class, realizes 
the value to the country of Christian education. Man after 
man rose to express his gratitude to the Christian College and 
to point out that missionaries alone had brought education 
to low-caste and out-caste people. The proposal was re- 
jected by 61 votes to 13, a most unexpected and happy event. 

One proposal, perfectly well meant, was made at the 
Government Committee on Education which aroused great 
indignation among our students. It was that various con- 
cessions should be made to the supposed weakness of women 
students and that the pass mark in examinations should be 
lowered for them. As the Principals of both the Women's 
Colleges opposed the suggestion, it was withdrawn, but this 
little incident shows two things, the sympathetic feeling 
of men toward the studies of women, and the distance that 
women have travelled since the time_ when they would 
themselves have requested such concessions. 

*Opposing the study of the Bible in our schools. 



Madras College 107 

In the recent agitation in favor of Natibnalism finding 
that the only constructive advice given was to devote 
themselves to Indian music, to the spinning wheel, which 
is Mr. Gandhi's great remedy for social and political ills, 
and to social service, I did all that I could to promote these 
ends. I asked the Senior Student to collect the names 
of all who wished to learn to play an Indian instrument, I 
presented the College with a pound of raw cotton and a 
spinning wheel of the type recommended by Mr. Gandhi, and 
the social service begun some months before was continued. 
This last consists of our expedition led by Miss Jackson, 
which twice a week visits an unpleasant little village not far 
from our gates. The students wash the children, which is 
not at all a delightful task, attend to sore eyes and matted 
hair and teach them games and songs, and chat with the 
village women about household hygiene and how to keep 
out of debt. One of our Sunday Schools is in this village, 
too, so by this time the students are welcome visitors, and 
whether they do much good or not, they learn a great deal 
of sobering truth. Of course, only a few can go at a time, 
but others find some scope in the other Sunday Schools and 
in the little Day School which Miss Brockway instituted for 
the children of our servants. This last means real self- 
denial, as the work must be done every day. Still, it re- 
mains one of our greatest problems to find channels for 
the spirit of service which we try to inspire, and without 
which the current of their patriotism may become stagnant. 

But I am being disappointed about the music and the 
spinning wheel. Not one student was willing to undergo the 
toilsome practice of learning an instrument, and though the 
spinning wheel was received with enthusiasm the pound of 
cotton has hardly diminished at all. Nor will they take the 
trouble to read the newspapers regularly. So that they 
might not feel that too British a view of events was pre- 
sented to them they are supplied with some papers of a 
very critical tone, but I need not have feared the risk, the 
papers remain unread. They much prefer the medium of 
speech, and are keenly interested in almost any topic on 
which we invite an attractive speaker to give an address, 
but they do not follow it up by reading. They are decidedly 
fonder of books than they were, and use the library more, 
but their taste is for the better kind of domestic fiction more 
than for anything else. There is one important exception, 
they all love Shakespeare and there is no one whom they 
so delight to act. Whenever they invite us to an entertain- 



108 Lighted to Lighten 

ment, which they do on many and various occasions, we 
are fairly sure of seeing a few scenes of Shakespeare acted 
much better than I have ever seen English girls of their 
age act. 

The students have been collecting a fund for our new 
Science building, a great and beautiful enterprise, which, 
also, is still in its proper stage. The drawing of plans so 
large and detailed has occupied many months. We are 
looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring 
these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is 
welcome, too, and particularly help from the students. They 
have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than 
Rs. 500. Their most important undertaking was a perform- 
ance of "Everyman" most solemnly and beautifully carried 
out before an audience of our women friends, and there 
was also a dramatic version written by one of the students 
of the parable of the prodigal son and performed before the 
college only. This last was remarkable in its adaptation of 
the story to Indian conditions and for the characteristic in- 
troduction of a mother and a sister. 




^-2'' \ 



THE OLD INDIA 
No Chance — No Hope 



"If she have sent her servants in our pain, 
If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword, 
If she have given back our sick again 
And to the breast the weakling lips restored. 
Is it a little thing that she has wrought? 
Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought." 

Kipling's "Song of the Women" 

The Medical School at Vellore is still without a per- 
manent home and is lodged in scattered buildings — 
without a permanent staff except for two or three 
heroic figures who are performing each the work of 
several — without a certainty of a regular income in 
any way equivalent to its needs — but it has an enthu- 
siastic band of students and it has Dr. Ida Scudder, 
and so the balance is on the right side. 



109 



CHAPTER FIVE 

Sent Forth to Heal 

"The Long Trail Who that has read "Kim" will ever 
A- Winding." forget Kipling's picture of the Grand 

Trunk Road, with its endless panorama of beggars, 
Brahmans, Lamas, and talkative old women on pil- 
grimage? Such roads cover India's plains with a net- 
work of interlacing lines, for one of Britain's achieve- 
ments on India's behalf has been her system of 
metalled roads, defying alike the dust of the dry 
season and the floods of the monsoon. 

One such road I have in mind, a road leading from 
the old fortress town of Vellore through twenty-three 
miles of fertile plain, to Gudiyattam, at the foot of the 
Eastern Ghats. It is just a South Indian "up country" 
road, skirting miles of irrigated rice fields, gold-green 
in their beginnings, gold-brown in the days of ripen- 
ing and reaping. It winds past patches of sugar 
cane and cocoanut palm ; then half arid uplands, where 
goats and lean cattle search for grass blades that their 
predecessors have overlooked ; then the bizarre shapes 
of the ghats, wide spaces open to the play of sun and 
wind and rain, of passing shadow and sunset glory. 
They are among the breathing spaces of earth, which 
no man hath tamed or can tame. 

An Indian ^1^ ordinary road it is, and passing 

"Flivver." over it the ordinary procession — 

heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bul- 

110 



Sent Forth to Heal 111 

locks; crowded jutkas whose tough, little ponies dis- 
appear in a rattle of wheels and a cloud of dust ; wed- 
dings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or 
mournful as the case may be. One feature alone dis- 
tinguishes this road from others of its kind; once a 
week its dusty length is traversed by a visitant from 
the West, a "Tin Lizzie," whose unoccupied spaces are 
piled high with medicine chests and instrument cases. 
Once a week the Doctor passes by, and the country- 
side turns out to meet her. 

When the Doctor Where do they come from, the pa- 
Passes by. thetic groups that continually bring 
the little Ford to a halt? For long stretches the road 
passes through apparently uninhabited country, yet 
here they are, the lame, the halt, and the blind, as 
though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of 
its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the 
tamarind trees, stands one village ; at the edge of the 
rice fields huddles another. The roofs of thatch or 
earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the 
landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of 
child-birth pain, its fever-burnings, its germ-borne 
epidemics where sanitation is unknown, its final pangs 
of dissolution. But once a week the Doctor passes by. 
What do she and her attendants treat? Sore eyes 
and scabies and all the dirt-carried minor ailments that 
infect the village ; malaria from the mosquitoes that 
swarm among the rice fields ; aching teeth to be pulled ; 
dreaded epidemics of cholera or typhoid, small pox or 



112 Lighted to Lighten 

plague. Now and then the back seat is cleared of its 
impedimenta and turned into the fraction of an am- 
bulance to convey a groaning patient to a clean bed in 
the hospital ward. Once at least a makeshift operating 
table has been set up under the shade of a roadside 
banyan tree, and the Scriptural injunction, "If thy foot 
offend thee, cut it off," carried out then and there to 
the saving of a life. 

At dark the plucky little Ford plods gallantly back to 
the home base, its occupants with faded garlands, 
whose make-up varies with the seasons — yellow chrys- 
anthemums with purple everlasting tassels at Christ- 
mas time ; in the dry, hot days of spring pink and white 
oleanders from the water channels among the hills; 
during the rains the heavy fragrance of jasmine. All 
the flowers do their brave best for the day when the 
Doctor passes by. 

Where no -^^^ what of the roads on which the 

Doctor Passes Doctor never passes? From Vel- 
by. lore's fortress-crowned hills they 

stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all 
the intermediate points of the compass. Every city of 
India forms such a nucleus for the country around. 
Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tama- 
rinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and 
bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black 
cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the vil- 
lages, the villages and the roads. Some mathemati- 
cally minded writer once computed that, if Christ in 



Kamala 

(Lotus 

Flower), 

Winner of 

The Gold 

Medal in 

Anatomy in 

Vellore 

Medical 

School 





i 



A Little 
Lost One — 
What Will 
Such Girls 
Do for India? 




CONTRASTS 



Sent Forth to Heal 113 

the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the 
villages of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the 
advancing years of the twentieth century many would 
yet be waiting, unenlightened and unvisited. Few 
have been visited by any modern follower of the Great 
Physician. Who can compute their sum total of 
human misery, of preventable disease, of undernour- 
ishment, of pain that might all too easily be alleviated ? 

A Problem in Was it, one wonders, the memory of 
Multiplication. the Gudiyattam road, and those like 
it in nameless thousands, that burned deep into Dr. 
Ida Scudder's heart and brain the desire to found a 
Medical School, where the American Doctor might 
multiply herself and reproduce her life of skilful and 
devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian 
women physicians? It is the only way that the mes- 
sage of the Good Physician, His healing for soul and 
body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, 
disease, and ignorance. One hundred and sixty women 
doctors at present try to minister to India's one hun- 
dred and sixty millions of women, shut out by imme- 
morial custom from men's hospitals and from physi- 
cians who are men. "What are these among so many ?" 
What can they ever be except as they may multiply 
themselves in the persons of Indian messengers of 
healing ? 

Small A"d so, in July, 1918, the Vellore 

Beginnings. Medical School was opened, under 



114 Lighted to Lighten 

the fostering care of four contributing Mission Boards, 
and with the approval and aid of the Government of 
Madras. "Go ahead if you can find six students who 
have completed the High School Course," said the in- 
terested Surgeon General, Instead of six, sixty-nine 
applied ; seventeen were accepted ; and fourteen not 
only survived the inevitable weeding out process, but 
brought to the school at the end of the first year the 
unheard of distinction of one hundred per cent, of 
passes in the Government examination. That famous 
first class is now in its Senior Year, and by the time 
this book comes from the press will be scattering it- 
self among thirteen centres of help and health. 

And so, in rented buildings, the Medical School 
started life. If ever an institution passed its first year 
in a hand-to-mouth existence, this one has. Short of 
funds save as mercifully provided by private means; 
short of doctors for the staff; short of buildings in 
which to house its increasing student body, for it has 
grown from fourteen to sixty-seven; short, in fine, of 
everything needed except faith and enthusiasm and 
hard work on the part of its founders, it has yet gone 
on; the girls have been housed, classes have been 
taught, examinations passed, and the first class is ready 
to go out into the world of work. 

Just here perhaps one brief explanation should be 
made. These girls will not be doctors in the narrowly 
technical sense, for the Government of India reserves 
the doctor's degree for such students as have first 
taken a college diploma and then on top of it a still 




FIRST BUILDING AT NEW MEDICAL SCHOOL, VEL- 
LORE, WHICH IS HOUSING OUR STUDENTS 



Sent Forth to Heal 115 

more demanding medical course of five years. These 
students will receive the degree of Licensed Medical 
Practitioner (L.M.P.) which authorizes them to prac- 
tise medicine and surgery and even to be in charge of 
a hospital. The full college may come, we hope, not 
many years hence, when funds become available. 
Meantime, this school will year by year be turning out 
its quota of medical workers whose usefulness cannot 
be over-estimated. 

A Visit to Let us pay a visit to the School and 

Vellore. see it as it is in its present state of 

makeshift. Since its beginning it has dwelt, hke Paul 
the prisoner, "in its own hired house," but Paul's 
epistles tell of no such uncertainty in his tenure of his 
rented dwelling, as that which has afflicted this institu- 
tion. The housing shortage which has distressed New 
York has reached even to Vellore. Two rented bunga- 
lows were lost, and, as an emergency measure, the 
future Nurses' Home was erected in great haste on the 
town site and at once utilized as a dormitory with some 
rooms set aside for lectures as well. 

Corpses and Let us first pay a visit to "Pentland," 

Children. the one remaining "hired house," in 

which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary 
Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house 
mother. Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully 
walled in, which serves as the dissecting room. To the 
uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, 



116 Lighted to Lighten 

for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. 
The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student 
who confides to you that during her first days of work 
in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly 
flanked by a friend on each side of her "to keep off the 
spirits that walk by night." After a few weeks of ex- 
perience, however, the fascinating search for nerve and 
muscle, tendon, vein, and artery becomes the dominat- 
ing state of consciousness, and the scientific spirit ex- 
cludes all resentment at the disagreeable. 

Pentland Compound possesses another feature in 
pleasing contrast to the dissecting shed. As you come 
away from a session there and close the door of the 
enclosing wall, from the opposite end of the com- 
pound comes the sound of children's voices in play. 
There in a comfortable Indian cottage lives the jolly 
family of the Children's Home. They are a merry, 
well-nourished collection of waifs and strays, of all 
ancestries, Hindu, Muhammadan, and Christian, mostly 
gathered in through the wards of the Mission Hospi- 
tals. Only an experienced social worker could estimate 
what such a home means in the prevention of future 
disease, beggary, and crime. It is good for the medical 
students to live in close neighborliness with this bit of 
actual service. One student in writing of her future 
plans mentions that, as an "avocation" in the chinks of 
her hospital work, she plans to raise private funds and 
found a little orphanage all her own ! 

Early Rising. Not far from Pentland are the new 



Sent Forth to Heal 117 

buildings of Voorhees College belonging to the Arcot 
Mission of the Dutch Reformed Church. For the 
present, the Medical School has the loan of its lecture 
rooms and laboratories in the early morning hours be- 
fore the boys' classes begin. That means seven o'clock 
classes, and previous to that for most of the students 
a mile walk from the town dormitory. Here is the 
Chemistry Laboratory. Freshmen toil over the puz- 
zling behavior of atoms and electrons, while in lecture 
rooms the ear of the uninstructed visitor is puzzled by 
the technical vocabularies of the classes in anatomy 
and surgery, and one wonders how the Indian student 
ever achieves this vast amount of information through 
the difficult medium of a foreign tongue. 

In Hospital Next in our path of visitation comes 

Wards. Schell Hospital, where the theories 

learned in dissecting room, laboratory, and lecture are 
connected up with actual relief of sick women and 
children. Here the students are divided into small 
groups and many kinds of clinical demonstrations are 
going on at once. In the compounding room you will 
see a lesson in pill-making. That smiling young per- 
son working away on the floor in front of the table is 
a West Coast Brahman, sent on a stipend from the 
Hindu state of Travancore. It is her first experience 
away from home and the zest and adventure of the 
new life have already fired her spirit. 

In this verandah another group are at work with 
bandaging. We watch them while brown arms and 



118 Lighted to Lighten 

legs, heads and bodies disappear under complicated 
layers of white gauze. 

In the large ward Seniors, equipped with head mir- 
rors and stethoscopes, with chart and pen, are taking 
down patients' histories and suggesting diagnoses. 
Soon it will be their work to do this unaided, and 
every bit of supervised practice is laying up stores of 
experience for the future. 

On the next verandah Doctor Findlay is giving a 
lecture and demonstration on the care and feeding of 
babies. Demonstration is not difficult, for the hospital 
always provides an abundance of ailing infants whose 
regulated diet and consequently improving health serve 
as laboratory tests. 

The Ford in a Now we follow the shady verandah 
New Capacity. around three sides of the attractive 
courtyard with its trees and flowering creepers. At the 
far end the class in obstetrics is going on. And be- 
hold, the irrepressible Ford has entered into a new 
province. This truly American product will probably 
be found to-day in every continent and nearly every 
country in the world, but one ventures to prophesy 
that Vellore is the only spot on the habitable globe 
where its cast-off tires have been metamorphosed into 
models of human organs ! Every student not working 
over an actual mother or baby is busy performing on 
these home-made rubber models the operations she 
may some day be called to do upon a living patient. 
In the midst of these Dr. Griscom is interrupted by 




Interior of the Temple Where God is a Stone Image 




Interior of the Hospital "Where God is Love 



Sent Forth to Heal 119 

a student. "Doctor, you remember the baby in the 
next ward that didn't cry for a week ? You know that 
this morning you slapped it and it cried for the first 
time, and its mother was very happy. Now she wants 
to hear it cry again, and says — may she please beat it 
herself ?" The Doctor leaves her Ford tires, and runs 
to the ward to explain to the overzealous mother the 
difference between massage administered by a physi- 
cian and the ordinary manner of "beating" a baby. 

Our next place of pilgrimage is the "town site" 
where the new Nurses' Home affords temporary dor- 
mitory accommodation. Beside it is the Doctor's 
bungalow, and in the open space next is to be built the 
big dispensary. This is well called the "town site," for 
it is in the thick of Vellore's population. Children, 
dogs, and donkeys swarm across its precincts, and 
there is no fear of these students being separated from 
the actualities of Indian life. The two-story buildings, 
however, give abundant opportunity for the occupants 
to "lift up their eyes unto the hills"; and the open air 
sleeping-rooms promise breezes in the hottest nights. 

"Mrs. Earth- Here, too, the Seniors have their lec- 

Thou-Art." tures in obstetrics, and with the be- 

ginning of that course a new difficulty arose. Equip- 
ment here, as in practically every Mission institution, is 
pitifully limited by lack of funds. For the proper 
teaching of obstetrics there is need of a pelvic mani- 
kin, lifesize. There were no funds to spare for so ex- 
pensive a piece of apparatus, and, if there had been, 



120 Lighted to Lighten 

there would have been a delay of months in getting it 
out from England or America. But meantime obstet- 
rics must be taught, and a manikin must be had. 
"Necessity is the mother of invention." Necessity got 
to work, and "Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art" is the result. Dr. 
Griscom sent for the potter, who left his wheel in the 
bazaar and came to this market for new wares. After 
long and detailed instructions, he returned to his wheel, 
and set it to the making of a shape never seen in the 
potter's vision of Jeremiah or Robert Browning. The 
first attempt was a failure ; the second and third were 
equally useless; at last something was produced that 
approximated the human size and form. The tires of 
the Ford were again requisitioned and, by the miracu- 
lous aid of the blacksmith, nailed to the pottery figure 
without wrecking the latter. "Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art" 
at last reposed complete, one example of the triumph of 
the missionary teacher over the handicaps of the situ- 
ation. We hope that her brittle clay will survive until 
such time as some friend from across the sea is moved 
to provide for her a "store-made" successor. 

"That which One more spot must be visited before 

shall be." our pilgrimage ends. No guest of the 

Medical School is ever allowed to depart without a 
visit to "the site," that pride of Dr. Ida Scudder and 
her staff. 

Three miles out from the dust and noise of the 
bazaars lies this tract of fertile land, the near hills ris- 
ing even within its boundaries, the heights of Kylasa 



Sent Forth to Heal 121 

forming a mountain wall against the sunset. Here in 
the midst of natural beauty, open to every wind of 
heaven, the dormitories, lecture room, chapel, and new 
hospital will rise. It will mean a healthful home, with 
the freedom of country life and endless opportunity 
for games and walks. The motor ambulances will 
form the daily connecting link with the practical work 
of dispensary and emergency hospital, 

"Who's Who." We have spoken much of buildings 
and courses of study, but little of the girls themselves. 
Who are they ? Where do they come from ? Why are 
they here ? What are their future plans ? 

They are girls of many shades of belief, from many 
classes of society. The great majority are, of course, 
Protestant Christians, representing the work of almost 
every Mission Board to be found in South India. 
There are a few Roman Catholics, and about an equal 
number of members of the indigenous Syrian Chris- 
tian community. Nine are Hindus, including one 
Brahman. They come from the remotest corners of 
the Madras Presidency, and some from even beyond 
its borders. 

Why did they come? There are some who frankly 
admit that their entrance into Medical School was due 
solely to the influence of parents and relatives, and 
that their present vital interest in what they are doing 
dates back not to any childhood desire for the doctor's 
profession, but only to the stimulating experiences of 
the school itself. Others tell of a life-long wish for 



122 Lighted to Lighten 

what the school has made possible; still others of 
"sudden conversion" to medicine, brought about by a 
realization of need, or in one case to the chance advice 
of a school friend. Two speak of the appalling need of 
their own home villages, where no medical help for 
women has ever been known. Some of the students 
have expressed their reasons in their own words : — 

"Once I had a severe attack of influenza and was 
taken to the General Hospital, Madras. I have heard 
people say that nurses and doctors are not good to the 
patients. But, contrary to my idea, the English and 
Eurasian nurses there were very good and kind to 
me, more than I expected. I used to see the students 
of the Medical College of Madras paying visits to all 
the patients, some of whom were waiting for mornings 
when they should meet their medical friends. I saw all 
the work that they did. The nurses were very busy 
helping patients and, whatever trouble the patients 
gave, they never got cross with them. They used to 
sing to some of them at night, give toys to little ones 
and thus coax every one to make them take medicine. 
I admired the kindness and goodness that all the medi- 
cal workers with whom I came in contact possessed. 
As medical work began to interest me, I used to read 
magazines about medical work. Again, when I once 
went to Karimnagar, I saw ever so many children and 
women, uncared for and not being loved by high caste 
people. I wanted to help Indians very much. All these 
things made me join the Medical School." 



I -«» mm 




A MEDICAL STUDENT IN VELLORE 



Sent Forth to Heal 123 

"My father's desire was that one of his daughters 
should study medicine and work in the hospital where 
he worked for tv^^enty years, and so in order to fulfil 
his desire I made up my mind to learn medicine. 

"Now my father is dead and the hospital in which 
he had worked is closed, for there is no one to take his 
place. So all are very glad to see that I am learning 
medicine. There are many men doctors in Ceylon, but 
very few lady doctors and I think that God has given 
me a good opportunity to work for Him." 

"For a long time I did not know much about the 
sufferings of my country women without proper aid 
of medical women. One day I happened to attend a 
meeting held by some Indian ladies and one Euro- 
pean. They spoke about the great need of women doc- 
tors in India and all about the sufferings of my sisters. 
One fact struck me more than anything else. It was 
about an untrained mid-wife who treated a woman 
very cruelly, but ignorantly. From that time I made 
up my mind to study medicine with the aim of becom- 
ing a loving doctor. My wish is now that all the 
women doctors should be real Christian doctors with 
real love and sympathizing hearts for the patients." 

"When 1 told my parents that I wanted to study 
medicine, they and my relatives objected and scolded 
me, for they were afraid that I would not marry if 
I would study medicine. In India they think meanly 
of a person, especially a girl, who is not married at the 



124 Lighted to Lighten 

proper age. I want now to show my people that it is 
not mean to remain unmarried. This is my second aim 
which came from the first." 

The following is written by a Hindu student: — 

"Before entering into the subject, I should like to 
write a few words about myself. I am the first mem- 
ber of our community to attain English education. Al- 
most all my relatives (I talk only about the female 
members of our community) have learnt only to write 
and read our mother language Telugu. 

"When I entered the high school course I had a poor 
ambition to study medicine. I do not know whether 
it was due to the influence of my brother-in-law who 
is a doctor, or whether it was due to our environments. 
Near our house was a small hospital. It was doing 
excellent work for the last five years. Now unfor- 
tunately the hospital has been closed for want of stock 
and good doctors. From that hospital I learnt many 
things. I was very intimate with the doctors. I ad- 
mired the work they were doing. 

"My father had a faithful friend. He was a Brah- 
man. He realized from his own experience the want 
of lady doctors. He had a daughter, his only child, and 
she died for want of proper medical aid. Whenever my 
father's friend used to see me he used to ask my father 
to send me to the Medical College, for he was quite 
interested in me, like my own father. After all, as soon 
as I passed the School Final Examination, it was de- 
cided that I should take up medicine, but at that time 




BETTER BABIES 
Throughout India. Feeding and Weighing 



Sent Forth to Heal 135 

my mother raised many an objection, saying the caste 
rules forbid it. I left the idea with no hope of renew- 
ing it and joined the Arts College. I studied one year 
in the College. Then luckily for me my father and his 
friend tried for a scholarship. 

"Luckily again, it was granted by the Travancore 
Government. 

'T am not going to close before I tell a few words 
of my short experience in the College. As soon as I 
came here I thought I wouldn't be able to learn all 
the things I saw here, I looked upon everything with 
strange eyes and everything seemed strange to me, 
too. But, as the days passed, I liked all that was going 
on in the College. The study — I now long to hear 
more of it and study it. Now everything is going on 
well with me and I hope to realize my ambition with 
the grace of the Almighty, for the 'thoughts of wise 
men are Heaven-gleams.' " 

You ask, what of the future? What will these 
young doctors bring to India's need ? How much will 
they do? Might one dare to prophesy that in years to 
come they will at least in their own localities make 
stories like the following impossible ? 

A woman still young, though mother of seven living 
children, is carried into the maternity ward of the 
Woman's Hospital. At the hands of the ignorant 
mid-wife she has suffered maltreatment whose details 
cannot be put into print, followed by a journey in a 
springless cart over miles of rutted country road. She 
is laid upon the operating table with the blessed aid of 



126 Lighted to Lighten 

anaesthetics at hand; there is still time to save the 
baby. But what of the mother? Only one more case 
of "too late." Pulseless, yet perfectly conscious, she 
hears the permission given to the relatives to take her 
home, and knows all too well what those words mean. 
The Hospital has saved her baby; her it cannot save. 
Clinging to the doctor's hand she cries : 

"Oh, Amma, I am frightened. Why do you send 
me away? I must live. My little children, — this is 
the eighth. I don't care for myself, but I must live for 
them. Who will care for them if I am gone? Oh, let 
me live!" 

And the doctor could only answer, "Too late." 

On that road where the doctor passes by, one day 
she saw a beautiful boy of one year, "the only son of 
his mother." The eyehds were shut and swollen. 
"His history ?" the doctor asks. Ordinary country sore 
eyes that someway refused to get well; a journey 
through dust and heat to a distant shrine of healing; 
numberless circlings of the temple according to ortho- 
dox Hindu rites ; then a return home to order from the 
village jeweller two solid silver eyeballs as offerings to 
the deity of the shrine. Weeks are consumed by these 
doings, for in sickness as in health the East moves 
slowly. Meantime the eyes are growing more sv/ollen, 
more painful. At last someone speaks of the weekly 
visit of the doctor on the Gudiyattam Road. 

The doctor picked up the baby, pushed back the 
swollen eyehds, and washed away the masses of pus, 
only to find both eyeballs utterly destroyed. One 




Freshman Class at Vellore 




Latest Arrivals at Vellore 



Sent Forth to Heal 127 

more to be added to the army of India's blind ! One 
more case of "too late" ! One more atom in the mass 
of India's unnecessary, preventable suffering, — that 
suffering which moved to compassion the heart of the 
Christ. How many more weary generations must pass 
before we, His followers, make such incidents impos- 
sible? How many before Indian women with pitying 
eyes and tender hands shall have carried the gift of 
healing, the better gift of the health that outstrips dis- 
ease, through the roads and villages of India? 

The existence of the Medical School has been made 
possible by the gifts of American women. Its contin- 
ued existence and future growth depend upon the same 
source. Gifts in this case mean not only money, but 
life. Where are those American students who are to 
provide the future doctors and nurses not only to 
"carry on" this school as it exists, but to build it up 
into a great future? It is to the girls now in high 
school and college that the challenge of the future 
comes. Among the conflicting cries of the street and 
market place, comes the clear call of Him whom we 
acknowledge as Master of life, re-iterating the simple 
words at the Lake of Galilee, "What is that to thee? 
Follow thou me." 

Rupert Brooke has sung of the summons of the 
World War that cleansed the heart from many petti- 
nesses. His words apply equally well to this service of 
human need which has been called "war's moral 
equivalent." 



128 Lighted to Lighten 

"Now, God be thanked, Who has matched us with His 

hour. 
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, 
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened 

power, 
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, 
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary." 



AN EXAMPLE O? CHRISTIAN TREATMENT 

Volumes might be written on the atrocities and absurdities of 
wizards, quack doctors, and the hideous usages of native midwifery. 
The ministry of Christian physicians comes as a revelation to the 
tortured victims. 

The scene is a ward in a Christian Hospital for women in South 
India. The patients in adjacent beds, convalescents, converse to- 
gether. 

"What's the matter with you?" says Bed No. 1 contentedly. "My 
husband became angry with me, because the meal wasn't ready when 
he came home and he cut my face. The Doctor Miss Sahib has 
mended me, she has done what my own mother would not do." Said 
another in reply to the question, "The cow horned my arm, but until 
I got pneumonia I couldn't stop milking or making bread for the father 
of my children, even if it was broken. The hospital is my Mahap 
(mother-father)." 

"What care would you get at home?" chimed in another who had 
been burning up with fever. "Oh! I would be out in the deserted 
part of the woman's quarters. It would be a wonderful thing if any 
one would pass me a cup of water," she replied. From another bed, a 
young wife of sixteen spoke of having been ill with abscesses. "One 
broiling day," she said, "I had fainted with thirst. The midwives 
had neglected me all through the night, and, thinking I was dying, 
they threw me from the cord-bed to the floor, and dragged me down 
the steep stone staircase to the lowest cellar where I was lying, next 
to the evil-smelling dust-bin, ready for removal by the carriers of 
the dead, when the Doctor Miss Sahib found me and brought me here. 
She is my mother and I am her child." 

An old woman in Bed No. 4 exhorts the patients around her to 
trust the mission workers. "I was against them once," she tells 
them, "but now I know what love means._ Caste? What is caste? 
I believe in the goodness they show. That is their caste," 

Words profoundly wise! 



|N the slope o£ the desolate river among tall grasses I 
asked her, "Maiden, where do you go shading your 
lamp with j'our mantle? My house is all dark and lone- 
some — lend me your light!" She raised her dark eyes for 
a moment and looked at my face through the dusk. "I have 
come to the river," she said, "to float my lamp on the stream 
when the daylight wanes in the west." I stood alone among 
tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp use- 
lessly drifting in the tide. 

In the silence of the gathering night I asked her, "Maiden, 
your lights are all lit — then where do you go with your 
lamp? My house is all dark and lonesome, — lend me your 
light." She raised her dark eyes on my face and stood for 
a moment doubtful. "I have come," she said at last, "to 
dedicate my lamp to the sky." I stood and watched her 
light uselessly burning in the void. 

In the moonless gloom of midnight I asked her, "Maiden, 
what is your quest holding the lamp near your heart? My 
house is all dark and lonesome, — lend me your light." She 
stopped for a minute and thought and gazed at my face in 
the dark. "I have brought my light," she said, "to join the 
carnival of lamps." I stood and watched her little lamp 
uselessly lost among lights. 

Rahindranath Tagore. 



129 



CHAPTER SIX 

Women Who Do Things 

India has boasted certain eminent women whom 
America knows well. Ramabai with her work for 
widows is a household word in American homes and 
colleges; President Harrison's sentences of apprecia- 
tion emphasized the distinction that already belonged 
to Lilavati Singh; Chandra Lela's search for God 
has passed into literature. The Sorabji sisters are 
known in the worlds of law, education, and medicine. 

But these names are not the only ones that India 
has to offer. In the streets of her great cities where 
two civilizations clash; in sleepy, old-world towns 
where men and women, born under the shade of temple 
towers and decaying palaces, are awakening to think 
new thoughts ; in isolated villages where life still harks 
back to pre-historic days — against all these back- 
grounds you may find the Christian educated woman 
of New India measuring her untried strength against 
the powers of age-old tradition. 

In this chapter I would tell you of a few such women 
whom I have met. They are not the only ones; they 
may not be even pre-eminent. Many who knew India 
well would match them with lists from other locali- 
ties and in other lines of service. 

These five are all college women. One had but two 
years in a Mission College whose course of study 

130 




DORA MOHINI MAYA DAS 



^1 



Women Who Do Things 131 

went no further; one carries an American degree; 
three are graduates of a Government College for men. 
All go back to the pioneer days before Madras 
Women's Christian College and Vellore Medical 
School saw the Hght, and when Isabella Thoburn's 
college department was small ; all five bear proudly the 
name of Christian; through five different professions 
they are giving to the world of India their own ex- 
pression of what Christianity has meant to them. 

Home Making Throughout India there exists a 
and Church group of women workers, widely 

Work. scattered, largely unknown to one 

another, in the public eye unhonored and unsung, yet 
performing tasks of great significance. Wherever an 
Indian Church raises its tower to the sky, there work- 
ing beside the pastor you will find the pastor's wife. 

Sometimes she lives in the heart of the Hindu town ; 
sometimes in a village, in the primitive surroundings 
of a mass-movement community. Eminent among 
such is Mrs. Azariah, wife of the first Indian bishop, 
and with him at the head of the Tinnevelly Missionary 
Society at Dornakal. There, in the heart of the Dec- 
can, among primitive Telugu outcastes, is this remark- 
able group of Indian missionaries, supported by Indian 
funds, winning these lowly people through the gospel 
of future salvation and of present betterment. 

It was on a Sunday morning that I slipped into the 
communion service at Dornakal. The little church, 
built from Indian gifts with no aid from the West, is 



133 Lighted to Lighten 

simplicity itself. The roof thatched with millet stalks, 
the low-hanging palmyra rafters hung with purple 
everlastings, the earth-floor covered with bamboo mat- 
ting, all proclaimed that here was a church built and 
adorned by the hands of its worshippers. The Bishop 
in his vestments dispensed the sacrament from the 
simple altar. Even the Episcopal service had been so 
adapted to Indian conditions that instead of the sound 
of the expected chants one heard the Te Deum and the 
Venite set to the strains of Telugu lyrics. The audi- 
ence, largely of teachers, theological students, and 
schoolboys and girls, sat on the clean floor space. One 
saw and listened with appreciation and reverence, 
finding here a beginning and prophecy of what the 
Christianized fraction of India will do for its mother- 
land. 

It was against this background that I came to know 
Mrs. Azariah, In the bungalow, as the Bishop's wife, 
she presides with dignity over a household where rules 
of plain living and high thinking prevail. She dis- 
penses hospitality to the many European guests who 
come to see the activities of this experimental mission 
station, and packs the Bishop off well provided with 
food and traveling comforts for his long and numerous 
journeys. The one little son left at home is his 
mother's constant companion and shows that his train- 
ing has not been neglected for the multitude of outside 
duties. One longs to see the house when the five older 
children turn homeward from school and college, and 
fill the bungalow with the fun of their shared experi- 



Women Who Do Things 133 

ences. Mercy, the eldest daughter, is one of the first 
Indian women students to venture on the new com- 
mercial course offered by the Young Women's Chris- 
tian Association with the purpose of fitting herself to 
be her father's secretary. In a few months she will be 
bringing the traditions of the Women's Christian Col- 
lege of Madras, where she spent two previous years, 
to share with the Dornakal community. 

But, though wife and mother and home maker, Mrs. 
Azariah's interests extend far beyond the confines of 
her family. She is president of the Madras Mothers' 
Union, and editor of the little magazine that travels to 
the homes of Tamil and Telugu Christian women, 
their only substitute for the "Ladies' Home Journal" 
and "Modern Priscilla." She is also the teacher of the 
women's class, made up of the wives of the theological 
students. A Tamil woman in a Telugu country, she, 
too, must have known a little of the linguistic woes of 
the foreign missionary. Those days, however, are long 
past, and she now teaches her daily classes in fluent 
and easy Telugu. There are also weekly trips to near- 
by hamlets, where the women-students are guided by 
her into the ways of adapting the Christian's good 
news to the comprehension of the plain village woman, 
v/hose interests are bounded by her house, her children, 
her goats, and her patch of millet. 

Such a village we visited that same Sunday, when 
toward evening the Bishop, Mrs. Azariah, and I set 
out to walk around the Dornakal domain. We saw the 
gardens and farm from which the boys supply the 



134 Lighted to Lighteij" 

whole school family with grain and fresh vegetables; 
we looked up to the grazing grounds and saw the herd 
of draught bullocks coming into the home sheds from 
their Sunday rest in pasture. I was told about the 
other activities which I should see on the working day 
to follow — spinning and weaving and sewing, cooking 
and carpentry and writing and reading — a simple 
Christian communism in which the boys farm and 
weave for the girls, and the girls cook and sew for 
the boys, and all live together a life that is leading up 
to homes of the future. 

It was after all that that we saw the village. On 
the edge of the Mission property we came to the small 
group of huts, wattled from tree branches and clay, 
inhabited by Indian gypsy folk, just settling from 
nomadism into agricultural life. So primitive are they 
still, that lamp light is taboo among them, and the in- 
troduction of a kerosene lantern would force them to 
tear down those attempts at house architecture and 
move on to a fresh site, safe from the perils of civili- 
zation. It is among such primitive folk that Mrs. 
Azariah and her students carry their message. Her- 
self a college woman, what experiment in sociology 
could be more thrilling than her contact with such a 
remnant of the primitive folk of the early world? 

Mother, home-maker, editor, teacher, evangelist, 
with quiet unconsciousness and utter simplicity she is 
building her corner of Christian India. 

Public Service. "To-morrow is the day of the Annual 




MRS. PAUL APPASAMY 



Women Who Do Things 135 

Fair and I am so busy with arrangements that I had 
no time even to answer the note you sent me yester- 
day." No, this was not said in New York or Boston, 
but in Madras ; and the speaker was not an American 
woman, but Mrs. Paul Appasamy, the All-India 
Women's Secretary of the National Missionary Soci- 
ety. 

It was at luncheon time that I found Mrs. Appas- 
amy at home, and persuaded her by shortening her 
meal a bit to find time to sit down with me a few min- 
utes and tell me of some of the opportunities that 
Madras offers to an Indian Christian woman with a 
desire for service. 

For such service Mrs. Appasamy has unusual quali- 
fications. The fifth woman to enter the Presidency 
College of Madras, she was one of those early pioneers 
of woman's education, of whom we have spoken with 
admiring appreciation. Two years of association with 
Pandita Ramabai in her great work at Poona added 
practical experience and a familiarity with organiza- 
tion. Some years after her marriage to Mr. Appasamy, 
a barrister-at-law in Madras, came the opportunity for 
a year of foreign travel, divided between England and 
America. Such experiences could not fail to give a 
widened outlook, and, when Mrs. Appasamy returned 
to make her home in Madras, she soon found that not 
even with four children to look after, could her inter- 
ests be confined to the walls of her own home. 

American girls might be interested to know how 
wide a range of activities Indian life affords — how far 



136 Lighted to Lighten 

the Western genius for organization and committee- 
life has invaded the East. Here is a partial list of Mrs. 
Appasamy's affiliations: 

Member of Council and Executive for the Women's 
Christian College. 

Vice President of the Madras Y. W. C. A, 

Member of the Hostel Committee of the Y. W. C. A. 

Member of the Vernacular Council of the Y. W. 
C. A. 

Women's Secretary for All India of the National 
Missionary Society. 

Supervisor of a Social Service Committee for 
Madras. 

President of the Christian Service Union. 

Of all her activities, Mrs. Appasamy's connection 
with the National Missionary Society is perhaps the 
most interesting. The "N. M. S.," as it is familiarly 
called, is a cause very near to the hearts of most Indian 
Christians. The work in Dornakal represents the ef- 
forts of Tinnevelly Tamil Christians for the evangeli- 
zation of one section of the Telugu country. The N. 
M. S. is a co-ordinated enterprise, taking in the con- 
tributions of all parts of Christian India and applying 
them to seven fields in seven different sections of In- 
dia's great expanse. The first is denominational and 
intensive ; the second interdenominational and exten- 
sive. India has room for both and for many more of 
each. Both are built upon the principle of Indian in- 
itiative and employ Indian workers paid by Indian 
money. 



Women Who Do Things 137 

In the early days of the N. M. S., its missionaries 
were all men, assisted perhaps by their wives, who with 
household cares could give only limited service. Later 
came the idea that here was a field for Indian women. 
At the last convention, the question of women's con- 
tribution and women's work v/as definitely raised, and 
Mrs. Appasamy took upon herself the burden of travel 
and appeal. Already she has organized contributing 
branches among tlie women of India's principal cities 
and is now anticipating a trip to distant Burmah for 
the same purpose. Rupees 8,000 — about $2,300.00 — 
lie in the treasury as the first year's response, much of 
it given in contributions of a few cents each from 
women in deep poverty, to whom such gifts are liter- 
ally the "widow's mite." 

The spending of the money is already planned. In 
the far north in a Punjabi village a house is now a- 
building and its occupant is chosen. Miss Sirkar, a 
graduate now teaching in Kinnaird College, Lahore, 
has determined to leave her life within college walls, 
to move into the little house in the isolated village, and 
there on one third of her present salary to devote her 
trained abilities to the solution of rural problems. It 
is a new venture for an unmarried woman. It requires 
not only the gift of a dedicated life, but also the cour- 
age of an adventurous spirit. Elementary school teach- 
ing, social service, elementary medical help — these are 
some of the "jobs" that face this new missionary to her 
own people. 

But, to return to Mrs, Appasamy, she not only or- 



138 Lighted to Lighten 

ganizes other people for work, but in the depressed 
communities of Madras herself carries on the tasks of 
social uplift. As supervisor of a Social Service or- 
ganization, she has the charge of the work carried on 
in fifteen outcaste villages. With the aid of several 
co-workers frequent visits are made. Night schools 
are held for adults who must work during the hours of 
daylight, but who gather at night around the light of 
a smoky kerosene lantern to struggle with the intrica- 
cies of the Tamil alphabet. Ignorant women, naturally 
fearful of ulterior motives, are befriended, until trust 
takes the place of suspicion. The sick are induced to 
go to hospitals; learners are prepared for baptism; 
during epidemics the dead are buried. During the 
great strike in the cotton mills, financial aid was given. 
Hull House, Chicago, or a Madras Pariah Cheri — the 
stage setting shifts, but the fundamental problems of 
ignorance and poverty and disease are the same the 
world around. The same also is the spirit for service, 
whether it shines through the life of Jane Addams or 
of Mrs. Appasamy. 

With the The autumn of 1906 saw the advent 

"Blue Triangle." of the first Indian student at Mt. 
Holyoke College. Those were the days when Oriental 
students were still rare and the entrance of Dora Maya 
Das among seven hundred American college girls was 
a sensation to them as well as an event to her. 

It is a far cry from the wide-spreading plains of the 
Punjab with their burning heats of summer to the 




PUTTING SPICES IN BABY'S MILK 
Notice Feeding Vessels, Shell and Tin Cup 



Women Who Do Things 139 

cosy greenness of the Connecticut valley — a far cry 
in more senses than geographical distance. Dora had 
grown up in a truly Indian home, as one of thirteen 
children, her father a new convert to Christianity, 
her mother a second generation Christian. The Maya 
Das family were in close contact with a little circle of 
American missionaries. An American child was Dora's 
playmate and "intimate friend." In the absence of 
any nearby school, an American woman was her 
teacher, who opened for her the door of English read- 
ing, that door that has led so many Oriental students 
into a large country. Later came the desire for col- 
lege education. To an application to enter among 
the men students of Forman Christian College at La- 
hore came the principal's reply that she might do so if 
she could persuade two other girls to join her. The 
two were sought for and found, and these three pi- 
oneers of women's education in the Punjab entered 
classes which no woman had invaded before. 

Then came the suggestion of an American college, 
and Dora started off on a voyage of discovery that 
must have been epoch-making in her life. It is, as I 
have said, a far cry from Lahore to South Hadley. It 
means not only physical acclimatization, but far more 
delicate adjustments of the mind and spirit. Many a 
missionary, going back and forth at intervals of five 
or seven years, could tell you of the periods of strain 
and stress that those migrations bring. How much 
more for a girl still in her teens ! New conventions, 
new liberties, new reserves — it was young David going 



140 Lighted to Lighten 

forth in Saul's untried armor. Of spiritual loneliness, 
too, she could tell much, for to the Eastern girl, always 
untrammelled in her expression of religious emotion, 
our Western restraint is an incomprehensible thing. 
"I was lonely," says Miss Maya Das, "and then after 
a time I reacted to my environment and put on a re- 
serve that was even greater than theirs." 

So six years passed — one at Northfield, four at Mt. 
Holyoke, and one at the Y. W. C. A. Training School 
in New York. Girls of that generation at Mt, Holyoke 
will not forget their Indian fellow student who 
"starred" in Shakespearian roles and brought a new 
Oriental atmosphere to the pages of the college maga- 
zine. Six years, and then the return to India, and 
another period of adjustment scarcely less difficult than 
the first. That was in 1910, and the years since have 
seen Miss Maya Das in various capacities. First as 
lecturer, and then as acting principal of Kinnaird Col- 
lege at Lahore, she passed on to girls of her own Prov- 
ince something of Mt. Holyoke's gifts to her. Now in 
Calcutta, she is Associate National Secretary of the 
Y. W. C. A. 

It was in Calcutta that I met Miss Maya Das, and 
that she left me with two outstanding impressions. 
The first is that of force and initiative unusual in an 
Indian woman. How much of this is due to her 
American education, how much to her far-northern 
home and ancestry, is difficult to say. Whatever the 
cause, one feels in her resource and executive ability. 
In that city of purdah women, she moves about with 



Women Who Do Things 141 

the freedom and dignity of a European and is received 
with respect and affection. 

The second characteristic which strikes one is the 
fact that Miss Maya Das has remained Indian. One can 
name var ous Indian men and some women who have 
become ?o denationalized by foreign education that 
"home" is to them the land beyond the water, and un- 
derstanding of their own people has lessened to the 
vanishing point. That Miss Maya Das is still essen- 
tially Indian is shown by such outward token as that of 
dropping her first name, which is English, and choos- 
ing to be known by her Indian name of Mohini, and 
also by adherence to distinctively Indian dress, even 
to the .embroidered Panjabi slippers. What matters 
more is the inward habit of mind of which these are 
mere external expressions. 

In a recent interview with Mr. Gandhi, Miss Maya 
Das told him that as a Christian she could not sub- 
scribe to the Non-Co-operation Movement, because of 
the racial hate and bitterness that it engenders ; yet 
just because she was a Christian she could stand for 
all constructive movements for India in economic and 
social betterment. One of Mr. Gandhi's slogans is "a. 
spinning wheel in every home," that India may revive 
its ancient arts and crafts and no longer be clothed by 
the machine looms of a distant country. Miss Maya 
Das told him that she had even anticipated him in this 
movement, for she and other Christian women of ad- 
vanced education are following a regular course in 
spinning and weaving, with the purpose of passing on 



143 Lighted to Lighten 

this skill through the Rural Department of the Y, W. 
C A. 

Another pet scheme of Miss Maya Das is the newly 
formed Social Service League of Calcutta. Into its 
membership has lately come the niece of a Chairman of 
the All-India Congress, deciding that the constructive 
forces of social reform are better to follow than the 
destructive programme of Non-Co-operation. Miss 
Maya Das longs to turn her abounding energy into 
efforts toward purdah parties and lectures for the 
shut-in women of the higher classes, believing that in 
this way the Association can both bring new interests 
into narrow lives, and can also gain the help and finan- 
cial support of these bored women of wealth toward 
work among the poor. 

One of Miss Maya Das's interests is a month's sum- 
mer school for rural workers, a prolonged Indian Sil- 
ver Bay, held at a temperature of 113° in the shade, 
during the month of May when all schools and colleges 
are closed for the hot weather vacation. Last year 
women came to it from distant places, women who had 
never been from home before, who had never seen a 
"movie," who had never entered a rowboat or an auto- 
mobile. " Miss Maya Das's stereopticon lectures car- 
ried these women in imagination to war scenes where 
women helped, to Hampton Institute, to Japan, and 
suggested practical ways of assisting in tuberculosis 
campaigns and child welfare. After four weeks of 
social enjoyment and Christian teaching they returned 
again to their scattered branches "with the curtain 




BABY ON SCALES 



Women Who Do Things 143 

lifted." That same lifting of many curtains in many 
parts of India is due to this energetic member of the 
Blue Triangle. 

Child Welfare. In the city of Madras there is to-day 
a young woman, quiet in appearance and low of voice, 
who has lately married and entered into the home of 
her own choosing. But the home is not for her com- 
fort during many hours of the working day. While 
Professor Chinnappa is busy with his lectures at Pres- 
idency College, Mrs. Chinnappa, better known as Dr. 
Vera Singhe is even busier, for she is the superinten- 
dent of the Madras Corporation Child Welfare 
Scheme* whose three centres were in fifteen months 
responsible for the care of 50,643 mothers. 

Statistics are the part of a book usually left unread, 
yet in this case they are worth noting with care. In 
Newark, N. ]., in 1917 out of every 1000 babies born 
88 died. In Madras during the following year, 1918, 
out of 1000, 355 died. In 1930, in one area of the city 
the infantile death rate rose to 50%. 

What makes the difference? Dr. Vera Singhe's re- 
port names over some of the causes; — overcrowding; 
young and inexperienced motherhood ; barbarous and 
untrained midwives ; ignorance of hygiene ; poverty , 
alcoholism ; syphilis. The list from Newark, N. J., 
would probably read not so differently. The social 
evils that kill babies are much the same all over the 
world, yet the difference in intensity raises the sum 



•Corporation of Madras— Report of Child Welfare Scheme, 1919-20. 



144 Lighted to Lighten 

total of their results from 83 in Newark to 355 in 
Madras. 

What is Dr. Vera Singhe doing about it ? With her 
two medical assistants, her corps of nurses, and the in- 
creasing number of health visitors whom she herself 
has trained, she has been able to reduce the death rate 
among the babies in her care during 1930 from the city 
rate of 280 for that year to 231. 

But enough of statistics. More enlightening than 
printed reports is a visit to the Triplicane Health Cen- 
tre, where in the midst of a congested district work is 
actually going on. We shall find no up-to-date build- 
ing with modern equipment, but a middle-class Hindu 
house, adapted as well as may be to its new purpose. 
Among its obvious drawbacks, there is the one advan- 
tage, that patients feel themselves at home and realize 
that what the doctor does in those familiar surround- 
ings they can carry over to their own home life. 

Our visit happens to be on a Thursday afternoon, 
which is Mothers' Day. Thirty or more have gathered 
for an hour of sewing. It is interesting to see mothers 
of families taking their first lessons in hemming and 
overcasting, and creating for the first time with their 
own hands the garments for which they have always 
been dependent on the bazaar tailor. For these women 
have never been to school — their faces bear that shut- 
in look of the illiterate, a look impossible to define, but 
just as impossible to mistake when once it has been 
recognized. With the mothers are a group of girls of 
ten or twelve, who are learning sewing at an earlier 



Women Who Do Things 145 

age, when fingers are more pliant and less like to 
thumbs. Then there are the babies, too — most of them 
health-centre babies, who come for milk, for medicine, 
for weighing, over a familiar and oft-traveled road. 
Fond mothers exhibit them with pride to the doctor, 
and there is much comparison of offspring, much 
chatter, and much general sociability. 

Back of the dispensary is the milk room, where in 
an adapted and Indianized apparatus, due to the doc- 
tor's ingenuity, the milk supply is pasteurized each day, 
and given out only to babies whose mothers are posi- 
tively unable to nurse them, and are too poor to buy. 

Of some of the difficulties encountered Dr. Vera 
Singhe will tell in her own words : 

"The work of the midwife is carried out in the 
filthiest parts of the city among the lowest of the city's 
population, both day and night, in sun and rain ... A 
patient whose 'address' was registered at the Tripli- 
cane Centre was searched for by a nurse on duty in 
the locality of the 'address' given, and could not be 
found. Much disappointed, the nurse was returning 
to the centre, when to her bewilderment she found 
that her patient had been delivered in a broken cart." 

Of some of the actual cases where mothers have 
been attended by untrained barber women, the details 
are too revolting to publish. Imagine the worst you 
can, and then be sure that your imagination has alto- 
gether missed the mark. 

Of the reaction upon ignorance and superstition Dr. 
Vera Singhe says, "In Triplicane dispensary as many 



146 Lighted to Lighten 

as sixty cords around waists and arms and variously 
shaped and sized pieces of leather which had been tied 
in much trust and confidence to an innocent sufferer 
with the hope of obtaining recovery have been in a 
single day removed by the mothers themselves on see- 
ing that our treatment was more effective than the 
talisman," 

Weighing, feeding, bathing, prevention of disease, 
simple remedies — knowledge of all these goes out from 
the health centres to the unsanitary homes of crowded 
city streets. So far one woman's influence penetrates. 

In a Hospital. It was on a train journey up-country 
from Madras, some twelve years ago, that I first met 
Dr. Paru. She and I shared the long seat of the small 
second-class compartment, and in that close neighbor- 
liness I soon fell to wondering. From her dress I 
knew her to be a Hindu, yet her jewels were few and 
inconspicuous. She was most evidently of good family, 
yet she was traveling unattended. 

Presently we fell into some casual talk, the inconse- 
quent remarks common to chance acquaintance the 
world over. More intimate conversation followed, 
and before the end of the short journey together, I 
knew who Miss Paru was. The oldest daughter of a 
liberal Hindu lawyer on the Malabar Coast, she was 
performing the astounding feat of taking a medical 
course at the Men's Government College in Madras, 
while systematically breaking her caste by living at the 
Y. W. C A. I almost gasped with astonishment. "But 



Women Who Do Things 147 

what do your relatives say?" I asked. "Oh," she re- 
pHed, "my father is the head of his family and an 
influential man in our town. He does as he pleases 
and no one dares to object." 

That was twelve years ago. Yesterday for the sec- 
ond time I met my traveling companion of long ago. 
She is now Dr. Paru, assistant to Dr. Kugler in the big 
Guntur Women's Hospital, with its hundred beds, 
managing alone its daily dispensary list of one hun- 
dred and fifty patients, and performing unaided such 
difficult major operations as a Caesarean section for 
a Brahman woman, of whom Dr. Kugler says, "The 
patient had made many visits to Hindu shrines, but 
the desire of her life, her child, was the result of an 
operation in a Mission Hospital. In our Hospital her 
living child was placed in her arms as a result of an 
operation performed by a Christian doctor." 

How did Dr. Paru, the Hindu medical student, de- 
velop into Dr. Paru, the Christian physician? I asked 
her and she told me, and her answers were a series of 
pictures as vivid as her own personality. 

First, there was Paru in her West Coast Home, 
among the cocoanut palms and pepper vines of Mala- 
bar where the mountains come down to meet the sea 
and the sea greets the mountains in abundant rains. 
Over that Western sea once came the strange craft of 
Vasco di Gama, herald of a new race of invaders from 
the unknown West. Over the same sea to-day come 
men of many tongues and races, and Arab and Afri- 
can Negroes jostle by still in the bazaars of West 



148 Lighted to Lighten 

Coast towns. Such was the setting of Paru's home. 
During her childhood days certain visitors came to its 
door, Bible women with parts of the N.ew Testament 
for sale, little paper-bound Gospels with covers of 
bright blue and red. The contents meant nothing to 
Paru then, but the colors were attractive, and for their 
sake she and her sister, childlike, bought, and after 
buying, because they were schoolgirls and the art of 
reading was new to them, read. 

The best girls' school in that Malabar town was a 
Roman Catholic convent. It was there that Paru's 
education was given to her, and it was there that 
prayer, even in its cruder forms, entered into her ex- 
perience. Religious teaching was not compulsory for 
non-Christian pupils, but, when the sisters and their 
Christian following gathered each morning for prayers, 
the doors were not shut and among other onlookers 
came Paru, morning after morning, drawn partly by 
curiosity, partly by a sense of being left out. Never in 
all her years in that school did the Hindu child join in 
the Christian service, but at home, when father and 
mother were not about, she gathered her sister and 
younger brothers into a corner and taught them in 
childish words to tell their wants and hopes and fears 
to the Father in Heaven. 

The lawyer-father was the abiding influence in the 
daughter's growth of mind and soul. A liberal Hindu 
he would have been called. In reality, he was one of 
that unreckoned number, the Nicodemuses of India, 
who come to Jesus by night, who render Him unspoken 



Women Who Do Things 149 

homage, but never open confession. A man of broad 
religious interests, he read the Hindu Gita, the Koran, 
and the Gospels ; and among them all the words of 
Jesus held pre-eminence in his love and in his life. 
When in later years he found his daughter puzzling 
over Bible commentaries to clear up some question of 
faith, he asked impatiently, "Why do you bother with 
those books? Read the words of Jesus in the Gospels 
and act accordingly. That is enough." Father and 
daughter were wonderful comrades. In all the years 
of separation when, as student and doctor, Paru was 
held on the opposite side of India, long weekly letters 
went back and forth, and events and thoughts were 
shared. When the hour of decision came, and the girl 
ventured into untried paths where the father could not 
follow, there were separation and misunderstanding for 
a time, but that time was short. The home visits were 
soon resumed and the Christian daughter was once 
more free to share home and meals with her Hindu 
family. And when one day the father said, "If a per- 
son feels a certain thing to be his duty, he should do it, 
whatever the cost," Paru rejoiced, for she knew that 
her forgiveness was sealed. 

Dr. Paru's entrance into the world of medicine was 
due to her father's wish rather than her own. He was 
of that rare type of social reformer who acts more than 
he speaks. Believing that eventually his daughter 
would marry, he felt that as a doctor from her own 
home she could carry relief and heaHng into her small 
neighborhood. Paru, to please her father, went into 



150 Lighted to Lighten 

the long grind of medical college, conquered her aver- 
sion for the dissecting table, and "made good." What 
does he think, one wonders, as, looking upon her to-day 
with the clearer vision of the life beyond, he sees the 
beloved daughter, thoughts of home and husband and 
children put aside, but with her name a household word 
among the v/omen of a thousand homes. Ask her 
what she thinks of medicine as a woman's profession 
and her answer will leave no doubt whether she be- 
lieves it worth while. 

Actual decision for Christ was a thing of slow 
growth, its roots far back in memories of bright-cov- 
ered Gospels and convent prayers, fruit of open con- 
fession maturing only during her years of service at 
Guntur. Life in the Madras Y. W. C. A. had much to 
do with it. There were Indian Christian girls, fellow 
students. "No," said Dr. Paru, "they didn't talk much 
about it; they had Christian ideals and tried to live 
them." There was a secretary, too, who entered into 
her life as a friend. "Paru," she said at last, "you are 
neither one thing nor the other. If you aren't going to 
be a Christian, go back and be a Hindu. At least, be 
something." At Guntur there were the experiences of 
Christian service and fellowship. Finally, there were 
words spoken at a Christian meeting, "words that 
seemed meant for me"; and then the great step was 
taken, and Dr. Paru entered into the liberty that has 
made her free to appear outwardly what she long had 
been at heart. 

Such are a few of those Indian women whom one 



Women Who Do Things 151 

delights to honor. They broke through walls of cus- 
tom and tradition and forced their way into the open 
places of life. Few they are and widely scattered, yet 
their influence is past telling. 

To-day Lucknow, Madras, and Vellore are sending 
out each year their quota of educated women, ready 
to find their place in the world's work. It gives one 
pause, and the desire to look into the future — and 
dream. Ten years hence, twenty, fifty, one hundred ! 
What can the dreamer and the prophet foretell ? When 
those whom we now count by fives and tens are mul- 
tiplied by the hundred, what will it mean for the future 
of India and the world? What of the gladness of 
America through whose hand, outstretched to share, 
there has come the release of these latent powers of 
India's womanhood? 

But what of the powers not released? What of the 
"mute, inglorious" company of those who have had 
no chance co become articulate? There among the 
road-menders, going back and forth all day with a 
basket of crushed stone upon her head, toils a girl in 
whose hand God has hidden the cunning of the surgeon. 
No one suspects her powers, she least of all, and that 
undeveloped skill v/ill die with her, undiscovered and 
unapplied. "To what purpose ^s this waste?" 

Into your railway carriage comes the young wife 
of a rajah. Hidden by a canopy of crimson silk, she 
makes her aristocratic entrance concealed from the 
common gaze. Her life is spent within curtains. Yet 
she is the descendant of a Mughal ancestor who carried 



152 Lighted to Lighten 

off and wedded a Rajput maiden. In her blood is the 
daring of Padmini, the executive power of Nur Jahan. 
With mind trained and exercised, she would be the 
administrative head of a woman's college. Again, — 
"To what purpose is this waste?" 

Who dares to compute the sum total of lives wasted 
among the millions of India's women because undis- 
covered? Will American girls grudge their gifts to 
help in the discovery ? Will American girls grudge the 
investment of their lives? 



ONLY like souls I see the folk thereunder, 
Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings, 
Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder, 
Sadly contented with a show of things. 
Then with a rush the intolerable craving 
Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call; 
Oh, to save these! To perish for their saving, 
Die for their life, be offered for them all. 

Myers 



The End 




A REPRESENTATIVE OF INDIA'S WOMANHOOD 

Miss Lilavati Singh, M. A., Acting President of the 
Isabella Thoburn College, who died in Chicago in 1909 
after thirty-one years of association with the college as 
teacher and pupil. A native of India, but a master of the 
English language, she was the first woman to sit on a 
wo;. Id committee, having been president of the Woman's 
Section of the World Student Christian Federation. In 
this capacity she lectured in Japan, in various countries 
of Western Europe and in the United States. 



INDEX 



Achievements of C h r i s t i- 

anity, 26-29; of women, 

130-152. 
Alliance, an international, 

83-109. 
America, students continue 

studies in, 140. 
American women, gifts of, 

to Medical School, 127. 
Anglo-Saxon civilization, 15. 
Appasamy, Mrs. Paul, 135. 
ArchiEoIogy, revelations of, 13. 
Aryan invades India, the, 14. 
Art Club, 88. 
Athletic teams, 87. 
Athletics, 42-43. 
Azariah, Mrs., 131 ; magazine 

edited bj^, 133. 

Blue Triangle, with the, 138- 

43. 
Brooke, Rupert, quoted, 127-8. 
Brown-skinned tribes, 13. 
Basket ball, 42-43. 
Butler, Mrs. William, 56. 

Calcutta, Social Service 

League of, 142. 
Caste and pride of race, 14; 

broken by Dr. Paru, 146. 
Chamberlain, Miss, 106. 
Character, training women in, 

and college education, 10. 
Chatterji, Omiabala, 68. 
Child marriage, 26. 
Child vv-elfare, 143-6. 
Child widows and education, 

67. 
Children, corpses — and, 115-6. 
Children's Home prevents 

disease, beggary, and crime, 

116. 



Chinnappa, Mrs. See Singhe, 
Dr. Vera. 

Christ, call of, must be heard 
to redeem the women of 
India, 5 ; demonstration of 
uplifting influence of, de- 
mands college education, 
10 ; transforming power 
through, 82; power, rev- 
elations of, 103. 

Christ's gift of education, 3. 

Christian education, Hindu 
or, 31-32. 

Christian ideals, distribution 
of, demands college educa- 
tion, 10. 

Christian unity in education, 
84. _ 

Christian women and need of 
India, 4. 

Christian workers, training, 
demands college education, 
10. 

Christianity, achievements of, 
26-29 ; Dr. Paru a convert 
to, 147. 

Church work and home mak- 
ing, 131-4. 

Churches should practice in- 
ternationalism, 6. 

Civilization, dawn of, 13; of 
Anglo-Saxon recent, IS. 

Cleanliness inculcated, 72. 

Co-education in India, 59-60 ; 
discussed by students, 64. 

College, why go to ? 57-61 ; 
teachers for high schools, 
58; doctors for hospitals, 
58-59; leadership, 59; 
motherhood, 59 ; co-educa- 
tion, 59-60. 



153 



154 



Lighted to Lighten 



College education and future 
of India, 10; for Indian 
girls justified, 101. 

College girls, missionary ser- 
vice one of the greatest 
fields for, 6. 

College woman, the, and 
India, 93. 

College women, pioneer ser- 
vices of, 81. 

Colleges, Indian, best for un- 
dergraduates, 6; must be 
made truly Christian to re- 
deem India, 6; should prac- 
tice internationalism, 6. 

Columbia University, 83. 

"Conscience clause," 106. 

Co-operation of missions, 84. 

Co-operative housekeeping, 
47-49. 

Corpses — and children, 115-6. 

Cosmopolitan atmosphere of 
Lai Bagh, 63. 

Cosmopolitan Club, 83. 

Crime prevented by Chil- 
dren's Home, 116. 

Death rates of infants, 143-4. 
Debt and dowry system, 100. 
Dissecting room at Vellore, 

115. 
Doctor, when the, passes, 

111-12; where no, passes, 

112-3. 
Doctors for hospitals, 58-59. 
Dowry, married without, 101. 
Dowry system, 100. 
Drama at Madras Christian 

College, 108. 
Dramatic Society, 88. 
Dramatics, 43-44. 
Dravidians, 13. 

Early rising, 116. 
"Earth-thou-art, Mrs.," 119. 



East, gifts of, to West, 15- 
19; to West, adjustments 
required for change from, 
139. _ 

Education, gift of Christ, 3; 
proved that Indian girls 
can receive, 4; of Indian 
girl, 22;for girls, 27; Hindu 
or Christian, 31-32; an in- 
strument to break down 
seclusion of the zenanas, 
56; college, and leadership, 
59; college, and mother- 
hood, 59; and early mar- 
riage, 67 ; and child widows 
67 ; and world peace, 83-84 
"triangular alliance" in, 83 
Christian unity in 84; col- 
lege, for Indian girls justi- 
fied, 101 ; missions can not 
long meet demand for, 104- 
5 ; Christian, Indian men 
testify to value of, 106. See 
School. 

Educated classes of India, to 
meet needs of, demands 
college education, 10. 

England, students continue 
studies in, 104. 

English, conquest of, the big 
job at high school, 40. 

Examination papers of stu- 
dents, 105. 

Fellowship, American, at Lai 

Bagh, 63. 
Findley, Dr., 118. 
"Flivver," an Indian, 110. 
Folk-lore, v/oman in, 16; 

woman heroine of, 17-18. 
Ford, the, in a new capacity, 

118-9. 
Future of India demands 

college education, 10. 



Index 



155 



Future? what of, 151. 

Gandhi, Mr., and Miss Maya 
Das, 141. 

Garden of hid treasure the, 
57-82. 

George, Miss, 84. 

Girl, Indian, today, 21-24; un- 
educated, 22; marriage of, 
23-24; Hfe of, 32-37; school 
life of, 40; religion of, 49; 
why go to college? 57-61; 
Girl students at Vellore 
Medical School, 121 ; who 
they are, 121 ; why they 
came, 121 ; their future, 125. 

Girls, proved that Indian, can 
be educated, 4; education 
of, 27; high school, where 
they come from, 37-38; 
what they study, 39-40; 
Indian, college education 
for, justified,' 101. 

God alone will not redeem 
India, 5 ; in nature, 50-52 ; 
transforming world 
through Christ, 82. 

Goreh, Ellen L a k s h m i, 
quoted, 80. 

Government. See Student 
government. 

Graduate from Madras 
Christian College, letter 
from, 103. 

Griscom, Dr., 118, 120. 

Guntur Women's Hospital, 
147. 

Harischandra, 43-44. 

Heal, sent forth to, 110-29. 

High school, at, 37-55 ; where 
girls are from, 37-38; 
studies, 39-40; conquest of 
EngUsh, 40; life of girls. 



40; athletics, 42-43; basket 
bail, 42-43; dramatics, 43- 
44; Harischandra, 43-44; 
student government, 44-47; 
co-operative housekeeping, 
47-49; religion of girls, 49- 
52; religion made practical, 
52; outlets for religious 
emotion, 53-55 ; teachers 
for, 58. 

Hindu or Christian educa- 
tion, 31-32. 

Hindu lawyer prefers Gos- 
pels to sacred books of 
India, 148-9. 

Hinduism, actualities of, un- 
printable, 3 ; and Christi- 
anity, 26-29 ; to Christianity, 
Dr. Paru a convert from, 
147. 

History Club, 89. 

Home life and college women, 
96. 

Home making and church 
work, 131-4. 

Homemakers, training, de- 
mands college education, 10. 

Hospital, in a, 146. 

Hospital wards at Vellore, 
117;8. 

Hospitals, doctors for, 58-59. 

Houses at Vellore, 115. 

Housekeeping, co-operative, 
47-49. 

Idol, wives of the, 25-26. 

"In the Secret of His Pres- 
ence," 80. 

India, poetry of, felt to be 
insincere, 3 ; no place for 
redemption of womian in 
the religions of, 3; need of, 
can only be met by edu- 
c a t e d Indian Christian 



15G 



Lighted to Lighten 



women, 4; silent revolution 
has begun in, 5; God alone 
v/ill not redeem, 5 ; future 
of, demands college edu- 
cation, 10; the Aryan in- 
vades, 14 ; Muhammadans 
invade, 18; co-education in 
59-60; superstition in, 92 
and the college woman, 93 
medical needs of, and sup- 
ply of women physicians, 
125. 

Indian conditions, Vi^orship 
adapted to, 132. 

Industrial education, 134; 
lessons in sewing, 144. 

Infants, death rates of, 143-4. 

Isabella Thoburn College, be- 
ginnings of, 56. See Lai 
Bagh. 

International alliance, an, 83- 
109. 

Internationalism, let churches 
and colleges practice, 6. 

Jahan, Shah, 21. 
Janaki, Miss, 84. 

Karma, 24. 

Kindergarten, Indian, 39. 
Kinnaird College, 140. 
Kipling quoted, 109; cited, 

110. 
Kugler, Dr., 147. 

Lai Bagh, 61-82; cosmopol- 
itan atmosphere, 63 ; schol- 
arship, 63 ; American fel- 
lowship, 63 ; first fellow. 
63 ; social questions, 64 
co-education discussed, 64 
early marriage and child 
widows, 67; purdah discuss- 
ed, 67-72; social services. 



72-79; cleanliness incul- 
cated, 72; religious in- 
struction by students, 72; 
medical instruction by stu- 
dents, 73; reading taught 
by students, 72 ; sewing, 73 ; 
purdah park suggested, 74; 
social service during va- 
cation, 74; social service 
and strikes, 75 ; visiting the 
poor and sick, 76; what 
alumnae records show, 81. 
See Isabella Thoburn Col- 
lege. 

Lamp and the sunflower, 85. 

Languages at Madras Chris- 
tian College, 84. 

Leadership forced upon edu- 
cated Indian girls, 4; train- 
ing native, demands col- 
lege education, 10; and 
college education, 59. 

Legal profession for women, 
94. 

Lela, Chandra, 130. 

Licentiate in teaching, 104, 
105. 

Life of Indian girl, 21-24, 2,2- 
37. 

"Lighted to lighten," 89. 

Literarv and Debating Socie- 
ties, 87. 

Literature ; magazine edited 
by Mrs. Azariah, 133. 

Lucknow, 61-82. 

Lyon, Mary, 57. 

Madras Christian College, 
letter from student at, 82; 
"triangular alliance, 83 ; 
inter-missionary, 84 ; nine 
languages represented, 84 ; 
sunflower and the lamp, 
85; campus of, 86; student 



Index 



157 



organizations, 87; student 
government, 87; athletic 
teams, 87; Literary and 
Debating Societies, 87; 
Star Club, 87; Natural His- 
tory Club, 88; Art Club, 88; 
Dramatic and Musical 
Societies, 88; History Club, 
89 ; Y. W. C. A., 89 ; social 
service, 90-91 ; applied psy- 
chology, 91 ; The Sunflower, 
91 ; superstitions, 92 ; the 
college woman and India, 
93; teaching, 93; legal pro- 
fession, 94; pohtics, 94; 
home life, 96; what one 
reformer achieved, 97 ; 
dowry system, 100 ; college 
education for women justi- 
fied, 101 ; letter from grad- 
uate, 103; extract from 
journal of teacher in, 104- 
108 ; students continue 
studies in England and 
America, 104; licentiates in 
teaching, 104, 105 ; exami- 
nation papers, 105; student 
body of, 106; "conscience 
clause," 106; effort to aid 
cause of nationalism, 107; 
social service by students, 
107; students of, love 
Shakespeare, 107; drama 
at, 108; students collect 
fund for science building, 
108. 

Madras Corporation Child 
Welfare Scheme, 143-4. 

Madras Mothers' Union, 133. 

McDougall, Miss Eleanor, 84. 

Magazine edited by Mrs. 
Azariah, 133. 

Manikin, makeshift, 120. 

Manu, laws of, 18. 



Marriage of Indian girl, 23- 
24. _ 

Marriage, early, and educa- 
tion, 67. See Child mar- 
riage ; Dowry system. 

Maya Das, Dora, 138-43; and 
Mr. Gandhi, 141. 

Medical instruction by stu- 
dents, 72). 

Medical needs of India and 
supply of women physi- 
cians, 125. 

Medical School, Vellore. See 
Vellore Medical School. 

Medical service, 111-12. 

Medical treatment, ignorant, 
125, 128; superstition in, 
145. 

Mid-wife, work of a, 145. 

Mid-wives, ignorant, 125, 128, 
145. 

Mission boards, fourteen, sup- 
port Madras Christian Col- 
lege, 84. 

Missions, criticism of, 11-12; 
can not long meet demand 
for education, 104-5. 

Missionary service one of 
greatest fields for college 
girls, 6. 

"Moral equivalent of war," 5. 

Morality and rehgion unre- 
lated, 52. 

Motherhood and college edu- 
cation, 59. 

Mt. Holyoke College and 
Mary Lyon, 57 ; first 
Indian student at, 138. 

Muhammadans invade India, 
18. 

Multiplication, problem in, 113, 

Musical Society, 88. 

Myers quoted, 152. 



158 



Lighted to Lighten 



Naidu, Mrs. Sarojini, 27. 

Nala and Damayanti, 17. 

Natural History Club, 88. 

Nature, God in, 50-52. 

National life of India, train- 
ing women for, demands 
college education, 10. 

National Missionary Society, 
136-7. 

Nationalism, effort to aid 
cause of, 107. 

Nur Jahan, "the light of the 
world," 20-21. 

Nurses' Home of Vellore 
Medical School, 119. 

Obstetrics, makeshift mani- 
kin for teaching, 120. 
"Once upon a time," 13. 
Opportunities for service, 135. 
Organizations of students, 87. 

Palm trees, school under, 
32-37. 

Parker, Mrs. Edwin W., 56. 

Paru, Dr., 146-150; breaks 
caste, 146; father of, pre- 
fers Gospels to sacred 
books of India, 148-9. 

Peace. See World peace. 

Physic ians, women. See 
Women physicians. 

Pioneer services of college 
women, 81. 

Poem by Rabindranath 
Tagore, 129. 

Poetry of India, 3. 

Politics, training women for, 
demands college education, 
10; women in, 94. 

Poor, visiting the, 76. 

Prostitution, religious, 25-26; 
protected, 52. 

Public service, 134-8. 



Purdah, origin of, 19; dis- 
cussed, 67-72. 

Purdah parks suggested, 74. 

Pushpam and her work as a 
reformer, 98. 

Race, pride of, and caste, 14. 
Rama and Sita, 16-17. 
Ramabai, Pandita, 130, 135. 
Reading taught by students, 

73. 
Redemption of woman, no 

place for, in religions of 

India, 3. 
Reform, 26-29. 
Reformer, one, and what she 

achieved, 97. 
Religion, the Indian girl's, 49 ; 

and morality unrelated, 52; 

made practical, 52. 
Religions of India, no place 

for redemption of woman 

in the, 3. 
Religious education, aim of, 

103. 
Religious emotion, outlets for, 

53-55. 
Religious instruction by stu- 
dents, 72. 
Revolution, silent, 5. 
Roads, metalled, in India, 110. 
Rukkubai, 28-29. 

Salvation, yearning for, of 
souls, Myers, 152. 

Sarber, Miss, 106. 

Schell Hospital, 117. 

Scholarship at Lai Bagh, 63. 

School, at, 31-37; Hindu or 
Christian, 31-32 ; under 
palm trees, 32-37. See Edu- 
cation. 

School life of Indian girl, 40. 

Science building, students 
collect fund for, 108. 



Index 



159 



Scudder, Dr. Ida, 109, 113, 
120. 

Sent forth to heal, 110-29. 

Servants of India Society, 29. 

Serveth, among you as He 
that, 53-55. 

Service, great field for, for 
college girls, 6; public, 134- 
8. 

Sewing taught by students, 
73; lessons in, 144. 

Shakespeare loved by stu- 
dents, 107. 

Sick, visiting the, 76. 

Singh, Lilavati, 130. 

S i n g h e. Dr. Vera, 143 ; 
quoted, 145. 

Sirkir, Miss, 137. 

Site, new, of Vellore Medical 
College, 120. 

Social life, moralizing, de- 
mands college education, 10. 

Social questions discussed by 
students, 64. 

Social services of Lai Bagh 
students, 72-79 ; during 
vacation, 74 ; and strikes, 
75; at Madras, 90-91; by 
students of Madras Chris- 
tian College, 107; in out- 
caste villages, 138. 

Social Service League of Cal- 
cutta, 142. 

Sociology, applied, 91. 

Solidarity of the world, 11- 
12. 

Song of the Women, The, 
quoted, 109. 

Sorabji, Cornelia, 94. 

Sorabji sisters, 130, 

Star Club, 87. 

Stone age, remains of, 13. 

Strikes and social service, 75. 

Student body of Madras 



Christian College, 106; at 
Vellore Medical School. See 
Girl students. 

Student government, 87, 44- 
47. 

Student organizations, 87. 

Students, examination papers 
of, 105 ; collect fund for 
science building, 108. 

Summer school for rural 
workers, 142. 

Sunflower and the lamp, 85. 

Sunflower, The, college mag- 
azine, 91. 

Superstition in India, 92; in 
medical treatment, 145. 

Suttee, 25. 

Tagore, Rabindranath, poem 
by, 129. 

Taj Mahal, 21. 

Talisman, reliance upon, 146. 

Tank described, 34. 

Teachers for high schools, 58. 

Teaching as occupation, 93; 
licentiate in, 104, 105. 

Telugu outcastes, missionary 
work among, 131. 

Temples, vile things connected 
with, 3. 

Thillayampalam, first fellow 
from Isabella Thoburn Col- 
lege, 63. 

Thoburn, Isabella, 56. 

Thumboo, Regina, 63-64. 

Tinnevelly Missionary So- 
ciety, 131. 

Today, yesterday and, 13-29. 

Traditions of womanhood, 
15-21. 

Trail, the long, a-winding, 
110. 

Transportation, Indian, 110. 

Treasure, the garden of hid, 
57-82. 



160 



Lighted to Lighten 



Triplicane Health Centre, 144. 

Union Missionary Medical 
School for Women, Vellore. 
See Vellore Medical 
School. 

Vacation, social service dur- 
ing, 74. 

Veil, use of, 19, 

Vellore Medical School, needs 
of, 109; modest start of, 
113; scholarship at, 114; Li- 
censed Medical Practitioner, 
115; visit to, 115; housing 
shortage at, 115; corpses — 
and children, 115-6; dis- 
secting room, 115; early 
rising, 116; Schell Hospi- 
tal, 117; the Ford in a new- 
capacity, 118-9; Nurses' 
Home, 119; makeshift 
manikin, 120; new site, 120; 
who the students are 121 ; 
why the students came, 121 ; 
future of the students, 
125 ; medical needs of 
India, 125; ignorant medi- 
cal treatment, 125, 129; 
gifts of American women 
to, 127. 

Villages, outcaste, social ser- 
vice in, 138. 

Vincent, Shelomith, 77. 

Visiting the poor and sick, 76. 

"War, moral equivalent of," 
5. 

Waste? to what purpose, 151. 

West, gifts of East to, 15-19. 

Widowhood, 25-26; compul- 
sory, 27-28. 



Wives of the idol, 25-26. 

Woman, redemption of, no 
place for, in the religions 
of India, 3 ; in folk-lore, 
16;heroine of folk-love, 17- 
18; and laws of Manu, 18. 
See Girl. 

Woman's Christian College, 
Madras. See Madras Chris- 
tian College. 

Woman's Foreign Missionary 
Society of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church, 56. 

Womanhood, traditions of, 
15-21. 

Women, Indian, are asserting 
their rights, 5; gifts of 
American, and Vellore 
Medical School, 127; who 
do things, 130-152. 

Women physicians, pre-med- 
ical training of, demands 
college education, 10; ef- 
forts to increase number of, 
113; supply of, and India's 
medical needs, 125. 

World, solidarity of, 11-12. 

World peace and education, 
83-84. 

Worship adapted to Indian 
conditions, 132. 

Yesterday and today, 13-29. 

Young Women's Christian 
Association of Madras Col- 
lege, 89. 

Zenanas, opening of, through 
education, 56. 



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